PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
FEMALE IMPERSONATION AND PATRIARCHAL RESILIENCE
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
FEMALE IMPERSONATION AND PATRIARCHAL RESILIENCE
IN EARLY STUART ENGLAND
By CHANTELLE THAUVETTE, B.A., M.A.
A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in
Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the
Degree Doctor of Philosophy
McMaster University
McMaster University © Copyright by Chantelle Thauvette, September 2013
i
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
McMaster University
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (2013)
Hamilton, Ontario (English)
TITLE: Female Impersonation and Patriarchal Resilience in Early Stuart England
AUTHOR: Chantelle Thauvette, B.A. (Concordia University), M.A. (McMaster
University)
SUPERVISOR: Dr. Melinda Gough
NUMBER OF PAGES: 224
ii
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
ABSTRACT
In seeking to explain why male authors assumed female pseudonyms in
seventeenth-century literature, this dissertation explores male-to-female crossdressing in Jacobean drama, effeminizing representations of parliament in Civil
War propaganda, and parodies of women’s sexualized, political speech during the
Interregnum and Restoration periods. My dissertation concludes that the
sexualized female persona evolved over the course of the seventeenth century as a
vehicle through which male authors could critique rival iterations of patriarchal
hierarchy forwarded by Stuart kings and by parliament without challenging their
own positions of masculine privilege within those hierarchies.
My first chapter explores the political critiques of Jacobean absolutism embedded
in the cross-gender performance narratives of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene (1609) and
the anonymous play Swetnam the Woman-Hater (1620). In my second chapter I
link male-to-female drag’s ability to critique an absolutist patriarchal paradigm to
the satirical attacks on parliamentary models of polyvocal patriarchal rule in
1640s print. My final chapter investigates how female authors often find
themselves shut out of the political discussions that female impersonations spark
by taking up Sarah Jinner’s almanacs of 1658-60. Jinner’s almanacs combine
predictions of rampant sexual wantonness with a critique of the waning
Protectorate regime. I examine how the pseudonymous response to those
almanacs from “Sarah Ginnor” depoliticizes Jinner’s sexual commentary on the
Protectorate government.
Sexualized female personae, I argue, could empower authors to critique
patriarchal hierarchies without overturning patriarchy itself. My research
interrogates the disproportionate power pseudonymous female personae offered to
male critics in their attempts to reform political systems they perceived as flawed
without undercutting the privileges such systems conferred on high-ranking men.
Understanding the role disorderly female sexuality plays in political critiques of
the Stuart monarchs and the English parliament provides a richer understanding of
the mechanisms which made patriarchal Stuart political culture resilient in the
face of intense challenge.
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I benefit enormously from a fantastic community of McMaster scholars who
encouraged, advised, and helped me as I pursued my doctoral studies. I am
thankful to Melinda Gough, Cathy Grisé, and Mary Silcox for recommending me
in the first place as a last minute addition to the PhD cohort, and to my thesis
committee, Melinda Gough, Helen Ostovich, and Mary Silcox, for their
encouragement and support throughout the process. I owe an especially large debt
to Mary Silcox, who was this project’s first audience and whose thoughtful
questions, suggestions, and advice have significantly and consistently shaped the
project for the better over the years. Helen Ostovich brought a keen editorial eye
and unflagging good humour to my project, and continues to inspire me with her
incredible energy and productivity. I have benefitted directly from the multiple
professional opportunities she has opened up for me as a scholar and owe many of
the amazing experiences I have had as a graduate student to her. I am profoundly
grateful to have had Melinda Gough as a supervisor and owe my success in large
part to the remarkable dedication, time, and care she puts into mentoring her
graduate students in all aspects of their academic careers. She was game for every
zany idea I had, no matter how weird or indecorous, and was invaluable in
helping me weed through which ideas would best push the project where it needed
to go. She has also been this project’s strongest advocate throughout, offering
brilliant encapsulations of the project’s scope and significance at key moments
that often ended up persuading me of the project’s value. I aspire to her
generosity, professionalism, and wit.
Kind thanks to Dr. Viviana Comensoli, my external examiner, for her generous
reading of my work and her thoughtful questions and suggestions on how to shape
it for publication.
I also owe gracious thanks to the English Department’s amazing support staff,
Antoinette Somo, Ilona Forgo-Smith, and Aurelia Gatto-Pinto. Your knowledge,
kindness, and generous assistance helped me face countless hurdles as a student
and sessional faculty member.
Colossal thanks to my colleagues in the English and Gender Studies and Feminist
Research departments, whose research and fellowship inspired me and recharged
my batteries at various points throughout. Thanks in particular to the members of
the Early Modern English Reading Group, Jessica Dell, Victoria Duncan, Michael
Gallant, Erin Julian, and Emily West for keeping me connected to the vibrancy,
iv
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
wit, and fun of early modern literature when my enthusiasm for my own topic was
flagging. Special thanks to Jessica, who was an unfailingly supportive and
generous cohort buddy, and to Erin, who walked with me (literally) during my
highest and lowest points of dissertation writing.
I would not be here today without my family’s encouragement and indulgence.
Thanks to my parents, Gerry and Marie-Claire Thauvette and Nancy and Brian
Bradshaw, for refusing to accept anything less from me than a graduate degree in
the humanities. They have provided me with countless forms of support over the
years, but what I treasure most is their uncompromising belief that I should pursue
the things I am most passionate about, no matter how odd or unprofitable. Thanks
also to my wonderful grandparents, Gord Fulton and Danielle Fraser, who have
enriched my life considerably in the years I have lived in the Toronto area, and to
Caroline Fulton and Rolly and Jean Thauvette, who have cheered me on from
afar.
Supreme thanks finally to Alia Martin, editrix extraordinaire, who faced the
myriad challenges of graduate school alongside me, who coordinated the most
elaborate and ambitious of defence celebrations, and whose friendship brightens
my life in every conceivable way.
I gratefully acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada, as well as the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities
for crucial financial support that enabled me to complete this project. Thanks also
to the Department of English and Cultural Studies and to the Edna Elizabeth Ross
Reeves Fund, who provided generous support for the research of this project.
v
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ……………………...……………………………………………. 1
Male-to-Female Cross-dressing as Patriarchal Critique
Voice, Ventriloquism, and Impersonation
CHAPTER ONE: MALE-TO-FEMALE CROSS-DRESSING AND PATRIARCHAL
CRITIQUE IN EPICOENE AND SWETNAM THE WOMAN-HATER ………………...…… 27
Boy-Actors, Female Bodies, and Amazonian Wives in Epicoene
Amazonian Disguise and Female Erotic Agency in Swetnam the
Woman-Hater
CHAPTER TWO: MASCULINITY, SEXUALITY, AND THE POLYVOCAL
PARLIAMENT OF THE ENGLISH CIVIL WARS …………………………………….. 85
Gender, Sexuality, and Polyvocality in Caroline Politics
Mock Petitions and the First Civil War
Female Parliaments and the Second Civil War
CHAPTER THREE: POLITICS OF FEMALE IMPERSONATION IN THE INTERREGNUM ALMANACS OF SARAH JINNER AND SARAH GINNOR …….…………… 157
Identifying “Sarah Jinner” in the Almanac Market of the 1650s
Sexual Content and Gendered Authorship: Analyzing Scholars’ Responses to
Ginnor’s Response
Jinner’s Silences and Jinner’s Successes as a Voice of Republican Critique
CONCLUSION ……………………...…………………………………………… 201
BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………...…………………………………………. 217
vi
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Introduction
This project explores the role of female impersonation in ensuring the
resilience of Stuart patriarchal hierarchies as they faced intense moments of crisis
in mid-seventeenth-century England. Assuming a female persona might seem to
put an individual at a disadvantage in a patriarchal culture which devalued female
speech. But, as this study shows, female impersonation proves surprisingly
empowering for a number of discourses which sought to critique the early Stuart
kings and Commonwealth and Protectorate leaders between the regicide and the
Restoration. Each chapter of this dissertation contextualizes female impersonation
as a form of critique specific to its immediate political context, beginning with
Jacobean drama that challenges father figures and kings, moving to pornopolitical satires of the 1640s which portray the dysfunctional relationship between
the king and parliament, and ending with astrological predictions that condemn
the crumbling Protectorate government on the eve of the Restoration.
The female personae I examine represent for the most part deliberate
attempts to embody disorderliness (sometimes figured as promiscuity, sometimes
figured as violent, noisy, or boisterous behaviour) in order to critique perceived
disruptions to patriarchal order. Because the early Stuarts integrated patriarchal
structures of the family into their models of kingship, I will argue that unruly
women became prime cultural signifiers of political protest to the early Stuart
1
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
regime. Ideally speaking, political power during the Jacobean and Caroline
periods flowed in a continuous chain from God to the king to his male nobles, and
so on, trickling down to male heads of households and their dependants. James I
deliberately encouraged this ideal in promoting tracts like God and King which
“insists on obedience to kings based on the ‘natural’ and divinely sanctioned
subjection of children to parents.”1 As Su Fang Ng writes, “James commanded all
schools and universities as well as ministers to teach the work, and directed all
households to purchase a copy.”2 Ng notes that the “analogy also worked in
reverse,” so that while “kings claimed paternal authority,” in tracts like God and
King, “fathers claimed to be kings of their domains in domestic handbooks.”3
Although the actual distribution of political power was far more complex than this
ideal suggests, the model itself provided the vocabulary to legitimize and
naturalize social and familial hierarchies at a fundamental level.4 The
householder’s status as king of his own domicile, family, and dependents was
traditional throughout early modern England and the Stuarts promoted the
analogy to emphasize the traditional aspects of their model of kingship with the
result that notions of family hierarchy became highly politicized. With husbands,
fathers, and kings functioning as icons of social order, we should not be surprised
that unruly womanhood should prove such a powerful vehicle for social, cultural,
and political critique in the early Stuart era.
2
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Although only a handful of scholars have studied female authorial
personae as a broader phenomenon, work by social historians on gender inversion
and festive cross-dressing informs my approach to early modern female authorial
personae. I discuss the relevance of this work on cross-dressing in the first section
of this introductory chapter, exploring in particular whether festive cross-dressing
challenges or restores social order and theorizing that the female personae I study
can be tools for political protest that nevertheless have at their core a
conservative, disciplinary function. In the next section I explore the intersections
between my project and work on female authorship and female voice. While the
plays, pamphlets, and almanacs I study all assume a female persona and/or feature
female characters, their authorship was likely male in most cases. I argue that we
should draw a distinction between the constructed, artificial nature of female
personae which satirize Stuart political hierarchy and female-authored
perspectives on early modern patriarchal oppression, and that both perform their
own kind of work in early Stuart culture.
Male-to-Female Cross-dressing as Political Critique
Natalie Zemon Davis, Peter Burke, David Cressy, and other cultural
historians have long debated whether the cross-dressing and inversion intrinsic to
early modern festive rituals challenge a dominant social order or subtly reinforce
3
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
it by enabling subordinate groups to vent their antisocial impulses at regular
intervals.5 While literary critics such as Jean Howard and Marjorie Garber have
argued that cross-dressing challenges the established social order, Cressy and
Bernard Capp have used records of instances when men were arrested for crossdressing to assert that authorities generally perceived cross-dressing to be
harmless so long as disruptions to class and gender hierarchies were limited to
festive occasions.6 Garber, who theorizes cross-dressing in literature from the
early modern period to the twentieth century, argues that “one of the most
consistent and effective functions of the transvestite in culture is to indicate the
place of what I call 'category crisis,' disrupting and calling attention to cultural,
social, or aesthetic dissonances.”7 This dissertation extends such discussions of
inversion and social order by exploring how the patterns of resistance and critique
embedded in festive cross-dressing were productively taken up in Civil War print
and subsequently in Interregnum almanacs.
Male-to-female cross-dressing seems to have been either less prevalent or
less frequently prosecuted than female-to-male cross-dressing, based on the
archival findings that Cressy and Capp relay. Cressy’s and Capp’s evidence adds
nuance to Howard’s and Garber’s claims that cross-dressing was a transgressive
practice by demonstrating how authorities tolerated it in certain contexts.8 In
contexts like the commercial stage, for instance, female impersonation was all but
naturalized (a phenomenon I discuss at more length in Chapter One). Cressy and
4
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Capp suggest that in practice cross-dressing was not especially transgressive.
Capp recounts for instance that “When Katherine Jones appeared before the
Bridewell governors on 3 January 1624, after being arrested by the constable of
Fleet Street in men’s apparel, she insisted that ‘she did it in merryment’” and
“[t]he governors accepted it was simply a New Year frolic, and discharged her.”9
A young Frenchman named Loydall caught in women’s clothing was released
under similar circumstances in July 1607 after his wife and neighbours affirmed
that “he did yt upon a merryment to fetch oysters and wthout [sic] any other
cause.”10 Cressy likewise concludes in his analysis of the Thomas Salmon case
that Salmon, a young servant, passed himself off as a maid in order to join his
mistress’s young daughter-in-law at the “post-delivery lying-in,” where he
“understood that there would be good cheer… and that, as usual, the drinking,
eating, and gossiping would be enjoyed exclusively by women.”11 “He simply
wanted some of that good cheer,” Cressy reasons, remarking that “[h]is crossdressing, from this perspective, was a response to scarcity, a means to temporary
betterment, comparable to that of certain disadvantaged women who are known to
have passed themselves as men.”12 Salmon’s cross-dressed penetration of the birth
room was serious enough to warrant a trial in ecclesiastical court but not serious
enough to warrant more than a formal penance. Festive license was thus
informally extended to those cross-dressers who affirmed that their cross-dressing
served no purpose other than a few hours’ entertainment. The instances of
5
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
dramatic and textual female impersonation I study belong to this tradition of
festive cross-dressing which licensed individuals to adopt female personae so long
as the context was for entertainment and the individuals were not genuinely trying
to pass themselves off as a member of the opposite sex.
Given this early modern tolerance for male-to-female cross-dressing we
might conclude that female impersonation in plays, satirical Civil War pamphlets,
and almanacs might be dismissible as nothing more than a lark – a staging of
disorder intended only to entertain readers with parodies of disorderly female
behaviour of the kind they enjoyed in festive contexts. But while the female
personae I study do seek to entertain and amuse their readers, I will be exploring
the serious political and social messages their parodies convey. Specifically, I will
be investigating how disorderly female personae critique patriarchs for their
inability to control unruly women in the first place. These female personae take
down individuals who misuse their power as patriarchs but reinforce the
patriarchal system itself at the same time by embodying a disruption to it that lasts
only until the moment the reader sees through the persona, rejects its outlandish
claims as satire, and gains a new perspective on the returned status quo as a result
of the persona’s jarring message.
Since the disorderly female personae I study are, for the most part,
constructed in order to be rejected in favour of a return to a more traditional vision
of patriarchal order (marked by female silence), the kinds of patriarchal critiques
6
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
they can accomplish are limited. Although Davis’s disorderly “Woman on Top”
could function as a symbol of female resistance, the specific instances of female
impersonation analyzed in this study are perhaps best considered as separate from
women’s struggles against the patriarchal limitations placed on them. As this
study will show, parodic female personae do not for the most part aim to bring
about equality between the sexes or aim to ameliorate women’s lives. While those
struggles certainly took place in early modern England, I will argue that the work
female impersonation accomplishes tends to reinforce a patriarchal status quo that
polices forms of extreme misogyny (as we will see in the first chapter’s discussion
of tyrannous patriarchs and kings) but also preserves cultural assumptions about
female inferiority. Female impersonations, as I will demonstrate, use stereotypes
about femininity to trope the disorder female impersonation seeks to redress.
Although female impersonation did not occasion revolutionary rejections of early
modern patriarchal hierarchy, my dissertation will demonstrate that the smallscale critiques of patriarchal abuses provided communities, and especially males
of subordinate status, with a way to enforce checks on patriarchal institutions and
individual patriarchs themselves.
Let us turn briefly to the Braydon Forest riots of 1631 as an informative
example of female impersonation that demonstrates the ways a community could
use performances of disorderly femininity to critique specific aspects of Stuart
patriarchal rule while leaving its basic sexist assumptions intact. The inhabitants
7
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
of Braydon Forest in Wiltshire violently protested against the enclosure of Crown
lands sold to London merchants in the 1620s. Three men later deemed the
ringleaders of the protests assumed the persona of “Lady Skimmington” during
the riots and cross-dressed as women to lead 1,000 other men and women in the
destruction of enclosures and property. Subsequently, the three “Skimmingtons”
were fined £500, a higher fine than anyone else arrested at the riots received, and
“ordered set in the pillory at the Western assizes dressed in women’s clothes.”13
As Buchanan Sharp remarks, the Privy Council “feared that Skimmington was
everywhere” in the early 1630s.14 Misleading reports that a single man named
Jack Williams was travelling from forest to forest under the alias of Lady
Skimmington and inciting the inhabitants to riot spurred the Privy Council to
order the capture of Williams alias Skimmington. As Sharp argues, the Privy
Council misread the situation in assuming that “Skimmington” was the alias of a
single individual. Sharp demonstrates that there were likely three unconnected
men named Jack Williams participating in enclosure riots in different locations,
but the name “Skimmington” itself was not an invented alias but the name of a
female persona well known in the Western midlands through the tradition of the
Skimmington ride and adoptedas a symbol of local enclosure protest by several
groups of protestors.15 While most of the female impersonations I analyze are
fictional or authorial constructions, the Braydon Forest riots present us with a case
in which men literally adopted the name, clothing, and disorderly violent
8
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
demeanour of a female persona in order to critique what they perceived to be the
Caroline court’s abuse of its power.
The sale of Crown lands which triggered the enclosure riots was an
attempt on the part of Charles I’s administration to settle royal debts without
having to call parliament into session to approve a tax increase.16 The ensuing
riots over the sale and enclosure of lands in Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, and
Dorset, known as the Western Rising, nearly constituted open rebellion against
the Caroline regime and resulted in massive property damage, although as Sharp
argues the rioters themselves were “concerned solely with the pressing local
issues of disafforestation and enclosure” in their communities and “had no
intention of overturning the government.”17 While the government mistook the
isolated riots of the Western Rising for an organized rebellion orchestrated by a
handful of Lady Skimmingtons, the politicization of Skimmington rides in the
1630s signals the relevance of gender and sexuality as symbolic tools for the
Braydon Forest rioters to reconfigure their relationship to the Crown.
“Skimmington” and “Skimmington riding” derive from a regionallyspecific tradition of charivari which targeted households in which wives beat their
husbands and/or cuckolded them. The ritual had many variants across
seventeenth-century England, but David Underdown writes that in the Wiltshire
and Somerset areas “female dominance, represented by the wife’s beating of the
9
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
husband, was the offense, surrogates for the offenders (preferably the next-door
neighbours) acted out the proscribed behaviour.”18 As Underdown describes, the
ritual involved putting “the ‘husband' in the position of humiliation, riding
backwards on horse or donkey and holding a distaff, the symbol of female
subjection, while the ‘wife’ (usually a man in women’s clothes) beat him with a
ladle.”19 Sharp draws clear parallels between the enclosure riots at Dean and
Braydon forests, noting that “Skimington was not the alias of any one individual:
it was common property and was only utilized in those areas – Braydon and Dean
– where it represented a genuine expression of the community’s outrage.”20 As
Christina Bosco Langert relates with respect to Skimmingtons, “[c]ross-dressing
provided a battleground for the contestation between individuals, communities,
and the state over the ownership of land” and “one’s social and gendered
identity.”21 As a fictional persona, Lady Skimmington operated as a means for
communities to critique power relations within a specific household, punishing
those who did not meet a common standard of patriarchal control. Yet in the
Caroline period men also began to assume the Skimmington persona as a means
to critique the English aristocracy who sold their traditional control of the
common lands to wealthy London outsiders. For the male commoners of the
Western midlands, Langert argues, assuming the female persona of Lady
Skimmington became a form of resistance to royal prerogatives, an assertion of a
local tradition which symbolized the local community’s right to control the land.
10
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Although the festive traditions of the Skimmington upheld a conservative view of
patriarchal hierarchy in the household, Skimmingtons in the Caroline period came
to embody a subversive challenge to class hierarchy in the English state. The
Lady Skimmington persona – like the cross-dressed characters in Jacobean plays,
1640s satirical pamphlets, and 1650s almanacs I explore in this dissertation –
provides “the framework for lawful lawlessness – an open space for dissenting
non-hegemonic voices to represent themselves.”22
Voice, Ventriloquism, and Impersonation
Focusing on female impersonation as a vehicle for male protests does risk
marginalizing women by re-excluding them from political conversations they
accessed with great difficulty in the seventeenth century. As Mihoko Suzuki
demonstrates in Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary
Form in England, 1588-1688, women were active participants in seventeenthcentury political movements. Whether female impersonation advocates for smallscale reform at the expense of female-authored critiques is a question each chapter
will explore with reference to the specific contexts of the impersonations in
question. In general, however, this project proposes that female personae are
capable of performing critiques which do not necessarily diminish the status of
female authorship or female speech by speaking “for” women. Rather, I will
11
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
argue that female authorial personae, in their recognizable artificiality, were
identifiable as tropes of gender inversion and were not likely to be mistaken for
female authors. Regarding the case of Sarah Jinner in the 1650s, I will argue that
female authors might even have had reason to assume carefully constructed
female personae in order to attract audiences interested in the kinds of satirical
political critique they could read in 1640s porno-political pamphlets. Since
disorderly female personae were not likely to “pass” as women, their messages
posed less risk of eclipsing the female-authored perspectives and female voices of
other political texts.
Questions of early modern women’s silence and voice which intersect
with my project received ample attention in the 1990s and early 2000s through
several collections of essays, such as Danielle and Elizabeth Clarke’s ‘This
Double Voice’: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England (2000) and Kate
Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen, and Suzanne Trill’s Voicing Women: Gender and
Sexuality in Early Modern Writing (1997). My project builds most substantially
on Elizabeth D. Harvey’s Ventriloquized Voices (1992), for like Harvey I am
interested in understanding the politics of assuming female authorship in early
modern English print. Ventriloquized Voices provides the most thorough
theorization of male authors writing in what Harvey terms a female voice. Harvey
studies in particular discourses in which male authors assume a female persona
and perspective, like the voice of Sappho or the voice of a feminized Folly, and
12
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
discourses where male authors write over female perspectives and experiences,
such as in the vernacular gynaecology and midwifery manuals of the seventeenth
century. Harvey points out that “[i]n male appropriations of feminine voices we
can see what is most desired and most feared about women and why male authors
might have wished to occupy that cultural space, however contingently and
provisionally.”23 In articulating the female voice as a “cultural space,” Harvey
outlines an approach she terms “tactical essentialism.” Harvey’s approach
acknowledges post-structuralist theories which challenge the primacy of the
author in the creation of textual meaning and French feminist theories which deny
the essential nature of gender and language while at the same time arguing that
the gender of an author can be a productive site of critical inquiry. I seek likewise
to balance a non-essentialist view of gendered authorship while maintaining that
the performed and perceived gender of a text’s authorship contributes to that
text’s meaning for the reader.
For Harvey, the difference between male and female authors does not
concern identity or essential difference but instead concerns imbalances in
political agency and access to political, cultural, and social discourses. Harvey
repeatedly rejects the essentialist premise that “men cannot know what it is to be a
woman and therefore should not speak on their behalf (no matter how beneficent
their motives are),” but argues that we cannot overlook the “ethical and political”
implications of men speaking for women in a patriarchal system which affords
13
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
power and privilege disproportionally to male speakers.24 As she writes, “we can
still adhere to a conviction that women and men (and their respective voices) are
not politically interchangeable.”25 In this respect we might productively draw
parallels between Harvey’s tactical essentialism and recent work by transgender
theorists, who argue that poststructuralist and queer accounts of gender’s fluidity
ignore how pervasive gender binarism and transphobia dramatically shape a
person’s lived experience, making their willingness or ability to conform to one
gender or the other crucial to securing their quality of life, agency, and access to
political, cultural, and social capital.26 Harvey argues ultimately that since men’s
access to discourse greatly overpowers women’s in the seventeenth century,
“ventriloquism is an appropriation of the feminine voice, and that it reflects and
contributes to a larger cultural silencing of women.”27 For Harvey male
ventriloquism is not a matter of male authors being unable to assume a female
perspective; instead, Harvey questions the effect such appropriations have on
early modern women’s marginalization.
My project continues Harvey’s work but uses different case studies to
further complicate her picture of appropriation. Harvey uses the term “voice” as a
means of locating the gendered speech of a text firmly in the gendered body of the
author. She justifies the connection she draws between an author’s body and
textual meaning by asserting that her approach best suits the specific texts she
analyzes and that “although much of post-structuralist theory has striven to
14
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
divorce the author’s body (and voice) from his (or her) writing, the constructed
voices within the texts I will be considering vigorously reassert their feminine
bodily origins.”28 The texts I have chosen, by contrast, construct femininity in
highly exaggerated, stereotypical, and parodic ways which signal to readers that
their authors only pretend to feminine bodily origins. To borrow an analogy from
queer and performance theory, Harvey’s ventriloquized voice constitutes an
author’s attempt to “pass” as a woman while the female personae I study are
better understood as “drag” performances intended to highlight the highly
constructed nature of gender. Does assuming a female persona appropriate a
female voice and silence women if readers recognize that an appropriation is
taking place? The answer, I will demonstrate, depends on the specific context of
the impersonation.
I have chosen to use the terms “persona” and “impersonate” in order to
maintain focus on the artificiality of the feminine figures I analyze and to
highlight that authors of either sex could assume constructed personae for the
purpose of critique or social satire. The verb “to impersonate,” in its seventeenthcentury form, meant to “invest with a supposed personality; to represent in a
personal or bodily form; to personify.”29 The verb “to personate,” however, holds
in the seventeenth century many of the connotations we have come to associate
with the word “impersonation”: “To assume the person or character of another
person), esp. for fraudulent purposes; to pretend to be, to act the part of” another
15
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
person.30 I use the terms “personae” and “impersonation” to connote a pretense –
an appearance that simulates but does not replicate an underlying reality.
Although impersonate seems a relatively new term in the late seventeenth-century,
the concept of “personation” as “the dramatic or literary representation or
depiction of a character” in the late sixteenth-century and as “the action of
assuming a character, or of passing oneself off as someone else, esp. for
fraudulent purposes” in the early 1620s covers roughly the same ground and
speaks particularly well to the artificiality that characterizes the female personae I
will analyze.31
Each of the three chapters of my dissertation focuses on a different set of
impersonations which respond to a different political and social context. Moving
chronologically through the reigns of James I and Charles I and ending just a few
years into Charles II’s reign with Sarah Jinner’s 1664 almanac, my dissertation
attempts to trace how female impersonation transitioned from a disciplinary
festive performance tradition like the Skimmington ride to a tool of male-authored
political satire in the 1640s to a vehicle for female-authored political critique in
the final years of the Interregnum. The first chapter explores dramatic
representations of female disguises in two Jacobean plays: Ben Jonson’s Epicoene
(1609) and the anonymous Swetnam the Woman-Hater (1620). I argue for a
distinction between the female impersonations of boy actors, who strive to pass as
female characters, and the male-to-female disguise plots of Epicoene and
16
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Swetnam, which take on parodic qualities more akin to those of drag performance.
Looking at the characters of Dauphine, Epicoene, and Lorenzo, I propose that
drag – defined as a parodic or otherwise self-reflexively artificial performance of
gender – offers younger men the opportunity to critique their elder male relatives
for taking their power as heads of households (and, in Swetnam’s case, as head of
state) to misogynistic extremes. Female impersonations, which in these plays
shame and reform elder male authorities, offer in the grander scheme a vehicle for
subordinate males to critique their patriarchal superiors and reform the patriarchal
systems they hope to one day inherit. In both plays, groups of women like the
Ladies Collegiate in Epicoene and the female court in Swetnam usurp patriarchal,
all-male institutions in open defiance of their exclusion from these institutions.
Rather than attempt to repress these women, the plays’ young male heroes reform
the patriarchs of their respective social households/kingdoms. Dauphine and
Lorenzo’s schemes challenge traditional patriarchal prerogatives, like Morose’s
right to marry and disinherit his nephew in Epicoene and Atticus’s right to choose
his daughter’s husband and carry out the death sentence she receives from the
Sicilian court. Yet Dauphine’s plan to have Morose marry a boy and Lorenzo’s
plan to defend his sister by disguising himself as her female defender, while
transgressive on the surface, work to preserve patriarchal assumptions about sex,
gender, and patrilineal inheritance by punishing their elders’ immoderate
behaviour without reforming the system that affords Morose and Atticus such
17
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
privileges. When order is restored both young men can ascend to power, access
their familial wealth and status, and eventually perhaps become heads of
households if they marry or patriarchal heads of their extended families. Neither
Dauphine nor Lorenzo seem like ideal patriarchal figures in the plays, as both
behave outside the norms of respectable adult masculinity, but by the end of the
play they do both manoeuvre their way into positions of high financial and social
privilege.
The second chapter shifts from mild critiques of Jacobean patriarchalism
couched in fiction to all-out attacks on England’s warring leaders in 1640s
political satire. I argue that authors use female personae in popular pamphlets in
ways reminiscent of female disguises in Jacobean drama: to call attention to a
problem in the patriarchal system and attempt to rectify it while forestalling a
complete overhaul of that patriarchal system. In the case of Civil War political
satire, I argue, female personae serve to critique the lack of univocal patriarchal
authority in the English government. The chapter first analyzes mock petitions,
which seem to parody female-authored petitions but which assume a collective,
sexualized female voice to address general concerns about parliament’s
dysfunctional relationship with the king that are separate from the specific
complaints female-authored petitions raise about parliamentary decisions and
interventions in Ireland, London, and abroad. Representations of parliaments as
female in satirical petitions like those of The Parliament of Ladies and the Mistris
18
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Parliament series, which I explore in the second section, critique parliament as a
polyvocal institution by personifying it as a disorderly, sexualized female body.
By shaming the king as an irresponsible husband and parliament as a promiscuous
wife, these personae hold up the male head of household as the ideal symbol of
order and blame Charles I and the individual members of parliament for their lack
of masculine self-control (preserving the actual offices while condemning the men
who hold them). The speech of the sex-crazed pseudonymous female personae I
study in this chapter facilitates a rejection of radical republican ideologies of
polyvocality and insulates Stuart ideals of univocal patriarchal hierarchy from the
ideological challenges they faced throughout the 1640s. While female personae
often critique the king and the members of parliament as unsatisfactorily
masculine, I argue that disorderly female personae reinforce the necessity for the
institutions of the monarchy and the parliament themselves to rein in chaos and
ensure a prosperous future for England.
In the third chapter of the dissertation I shift to the final years of the
Protectorate to investigate the almanacs of Sarah Jinner and her impersonator, the
pseudonymous Sarah Ginnor. In this final chapter I explore in more depth whether
women could use the disorderly female persona, and the sexual content that
becomes strongly associated with it in the 1640s, to formulate their own critiques
of the early Stuart political system. Modern critics argue that Jinner’s career was
threatened by a pseudonymous parody of her 1658 almanac which impersonated
19
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Jinner’s and trivialized female authorship and astrology. I contend, however, that
Jinner’s career as an almanac compiler stalled in 1664 because the Stationers’
Company and its licensers took her seriously as an author and a critic of political
corruption. By comparing the ways Jinner and her impersonator treat sexual and
political topics, I conclude that Jinner constructs a female authorial persona that
uses sexual satire to critique the Protectorate government, while Ginnor’s
impersonation depoliticizes Jinner’s sexual content by isolating it from its
political context in an attempt to undermine the power such female personae (and
female authors) held.
By selecting very specific case studies – two Jacobean plays, two
particular subgenres of royalist political satire, and the four almanacs of one
compiler – I have limited the scope of my project to contexts in which female
impersonation enables patriarchal critique. This project does not explore the full
range of male-to-female cross-dressing in early modern England nor does it
suggest a cohesive narrative about what that cross-dressing might signify. In
focusing on drama and cheap print authorship, for instance, this project leaves out
discussions of fictional cross-dressing plots that recur in prose romances like
Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Mary Wroth’s Urania in which men dress in female
disguises to penetrate female spaces for sexual reasons. These kinds of plots,
which also appear in anonymous ballads like Sport upon Sport and in plays like
Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World My Masters (1608), James Shirley’s A Bird in
20
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
a Cage (1633), and Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure (1668),
feature cross-dressing as a ruse to further a male character’s sexual ends. While
the female impersonators I analyze critique the patriarchal system, these fantasies
of access to female spaces and female bodies seem more interested in profiting
secretly from the loopholes for promiscuity embedded in an early modern
patriarchal system which assumes that sex between women is inconsequential and
subsequently does not regulate all-female spaces in the ways it regulates other
spaces. Female disguise plots which focus on access fantasies challenge a binary
view of sexuality and gender in ways that are perhaps more transgressive and
visionary than the disorderly female personae I investigate (which parody
predictable misogynist stereotypes to absurd extremes). Since access fantasy
disguise plots concern extended moments where male characters “pass” as women
and the female personae I examine in this dissertation typically perform parodic
drag,32 these two forms of female impersonation deserve study as related but
ultimately separate phenomenon. For the purposes of this project, I focus on
female impersonations which have at their root the political and disciplinary
functions of festive cross-dressing traditions like Skimmington rides.
Another limitation of this project is that with the exception of the third
chapter it cannot account for women’s experiences of patriarchal oppression. By
focusing on instances of female impersonation I risk re-marginalizing female
authors in favour of male authors. Since many of the texts I analyze are
21
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
pseudonymous, there is a small chance that some of the parodic female personae
were written by women. But even if we suppose that some of the pseudonymous
pamphlets and the anonymous Swetnam the Woman-Hater had female authors, the
texts still construct stereotypical female personae – like the sexually insatiable
virgins in The Virgins Complaint of 1642 or the righteous, angry Amazon Atlanta
in Swetnam– based on pre-existing misogynist tropes rather than attempting to
provide the kinds of nuanced critiques of politics and patriarchal culture that
appeared in female-authored Civil War petitions like The Humble Petition of
Many Hundreds of Distressed Women, Tradesmens Wives, and Widdowes of
1642. Sarah Jinner’s Interregnum and Restoration almanacs, which critics accept
as female-authored and which combine a deliberately constructed authorial
persona with a critique of the Protectorate, stand as the exception. While Jinner’s
case demonstrates that by the mid-seventeenth century women could use tropes of
female and sexual disorder in order to critique patriarchal hierarchy in the ways
that men could, Jinner’s limited time as an almanac compiler also suggests that
her position was difficult to maintain.
Although women’s resistance falls largely outside the scope of this
project, then, this study of female impersonation provides insight into how the
connection between sexuality and politics forged by the family-state analogy
invested figures of disorderly femininity with the power to critique the early
Stuart court and hold patriarchal elites accountable to their subordinates. In
22
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
seeking to understand how men critiqued their patriarchal superiors – agitating
against changes to traditional relationships as the Braydon Forest Skimmington
protestors did with respect to enclosure, or as the female mock petitioners did to
parliament by assuming the king’s role as head of state in the mid-1640s – this
project also illuminates some of the reasons why the radical rhetoric of the Civil
Wars periods, which envisioned a far more representative system of government,
did not yield lasting political change for England. The female persona, I will
demonstrate, is a vehicle for small scale critiques aimed at fine tuning a
patriarchal system in crisis with incremental reforms that improve the patriarchal
subordinate’s experience. The Parliament of Ladies’s argument that monogamous
marriage should be abolished and other radical critiques seem to advocate the
overthrow of the current system. But the fact that such radical critiques come
from satirical female personae softens their radical edge, making them palatable
as satire. The status quo of the early Stuart monarchy seems like a desirable
alternative to the anarchy the female personae propose. Thus although many of
the female personae I study appear on the surface to be figures of resistance, most
serve to make patriarchal models like the monarchy and the family resilient in the
face of widespread challenge from radicals and visionaries. Female
impersonation’s potential for reform may not ultimately benefit women, but it is
still useful for an understanding of how patriarchies might be subject to
23
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
incremental change from within, change initiated by the subjects it privileges
instead of those whose needs and powers it disavows.
Notes
1
Ng, Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-century England, 1.
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
4
Ng notes that “the family-state analogy has been read as fundamentally
conservative and authoritarian, if not absolutist” (1). Her work demonstrates,
however, that seventeenth-century “authors could appeal to different
conceptualizations of the relation between family and state for a variety of
political ends. The family-state analogy proved to be enduring and its deployment
was not simply a mark of social conservatism. Rather, it was a sign of the
politicization of literature” (7).
5
See Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France; Burke, Popular
Culture in Early Modern Europe; and Cressy, “Gender Trouble and CrossDressing in Early Modern England.”
6
See Howard, “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern
England”; Garber, Vested Interests : Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety; and
Capp, “Playgoers, Players and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern London : The
Bridewell Evidence.”
7
Garber, 16.
8
Cressy’s article responds to Howard’s analysis of female-to-male cross-dressing
as transgressive in early modern Europe with an analysis of male-to-female crossdressing that shows that cross-dressing was generally accepted and infrequently
prosecuted. Capp’s analysis of the legal charges brought against male and female
cross-dressers supports Cressy’s thesis but Howard’s thesis provides compelling
evidence that women’s attempts to pass as men were regarded as a more
threatening cultural phenomenon than individual cases brought against male and
female transvestites might lead us to believe.
9
Capp, “Playgoers, Players and Cross-Dressing,” esp. 165.
10
Ibid, 167.
11
Cressy, 450.
12
Ibid.
2
24
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
13
Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of
England, 1586-1660, 108.
14
Ibid, 105.
15
Ibid, 103-4.
16
Part of Braydon Forest was sold in 1627 to the Crown Jeweler, Philip Jacobsen,
to settle a debt the king owed Jacobsen for jewels. Sharp, 90.
17
Ibid, 96-8.
18
Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion, 102.
19
Ibid, 102.
20
Sharp, 105.
21
Langert, “Hedgerows and Petticoats : Sartorial Subversion and Anti-enclosure
Protest in Seventeenth-century England,” 119.
22
Ibid, 132.
23
Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance
Texts, 32.
24
Ibid, 12.
25
Ibid, 13.
26
See Stephen Whittle’s foreword to The Transgender Studies Reader, where he
argues that "It is all very well having no theoretical place within the current
gendered world, but that is not the daily lived experience. Real life affords trans
people constant stigma and oppression based on the apparently unreal concept of
gender. This is one of the most significant issues that trans people have brought to
feminist and queer theory," xii.
27
Harvey, 12.
28
Ibid, 3.
29
OED Online, “personation, n.,” 2.a.
30
OED Online, “personate, v.,” 3.b.
31
OED Online, “personation, n.,” 1, 2.
32
With the notable exception of Epicoene, who passes until the final scene of the
play when Dauphine reveals her to be a boy.
25
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Chapter One: Male-to-Female Cross-dressing and Patriarchal
Critique in Epicoene and Swetnam the Woman-Hater
Why did men assume female personae in seventeenth-century popular
culture? Although I ask in Chapters Two and Three why authors assumed a
sexualized female voice in popular print, the question of why men assumed
female personae at all requires an answer first. The all-male casts of the
commercial theatres in pre-Restoration England have kept female impersonation
at the forefront of queer and feminist readings of early modern English drama, but
a connection between female impersonation on the stage and female
impersonation in print has yet to be theorized. This chapter focuses on a type of
cross-gender performance that has received very little critical attention: the
phenomenon of the male actor playing a male character who assumes a female
persona. The trope of the male character assuming a female disguise to infiltrate a
female space or court a female partner recurs frequently in prose romances like
Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Mary Wroth’s Urania, and others.1 Discussions of male
cross-dressing on the stage, however, overwhelmingly focus on the transvestism
of boy actors playing female characters while paying little attention to the handful
of male characters who appear in female disguise or dress as part of the plot.
These diegetic cross-gender performances, as noted in this dissertation’s
introduction, emerge from a tradition of festive cross-dressing. Their ability to
27
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
unsettle audiences’ expectations and highlight contradictions in audiences’
assumptions about gender separates them from the meta-diegetic cross-dressing of
boy actors who seem to “pass” almost effortlessly as female characters so long as
playwrights do not call attention to their masculine sex. While boy actors pass, the
cross-dressing plots I explore in this chapter feature characters who assume
female identities but have their male sex revealed by the end of the play.
Moreover, whereas in most cases the passing boy actors do not seem to overtly
threaten hierarchies of patriarchal privilege with their passing, the conspicuously
male performances of femininity of the type that I discuss here serve most often to
disrupt or challenge figures of male authority, be they fathers, dukes, or other
older male relatives, as part of a broader social commentary on Jacobean
patriarchal authority. That the plays I examine are comedies and tragi-comedies
explains their interest in challenging and critiquing an established order, but in
this chapter I seek to clarify how and why male-to-female cross-dressing, and
parodic drag in particular, becomes such an important vehicle for critiquing elite
masculine authority during the Jacobean period.
By looking at moments where male characters assume feminine disguises
in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene and the anonymous Swetnam the Woman-Hater
Arraigned by Women, I will demonstrate that drag empowers male characters like
Lorenzo (who adopts an Amazonian disguise) and Dauphine (who engineers
Epicoene’s Amazonian drag performance) to critique patriarchal society in ways
28
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
that would not be socially acceptable or effective had the critique come from
female characters like the Ladies Collegiate or the all-female court. Looking
specifically at the ways that male critique of women’s sexual commodification
proves effective when coming from someone perceived to be in female drag, I
further suggest that in early Stuart England drag served as an effective way to
challenge specific abuses within a patriarchal system while at the same time
buffering that system against a more radical (female-led) critique.
Boy-Actors, Female Bodies, and Amazonian Wives in Epicoene
Much has been written on cross-gender performance in seventeenthcentury drama, most of which takes up three central, overlapping threads of
critical inquiry related to the all-male stage of early modern England:2 1) the fluid
gender and sexuality of the boy actors who played female roles, 2) the
transgressive sexuality of plots in which boy actors playing female roles assume
male disguises and engage in romantic relationships with male characters (e.g.,
Twelfth Night), and 3) the challenge the boys’ fluid gender and sexuality onstage
posed to the perceived stability of binarized gender and sexual identities offstage.
As a context for female impersonation, the practice of casting boys as women
appears to have been so specifically tied to the commercial stage that it does not
seem to have greatly impacted perceptions of female impersonation off the stage.
Although women performed on continental stages throughout the early modern
29
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
period and English women continued to perform as amateurs in their communities
and households and to dance non-speaking roles in masques at the courts of James
I and Charles I,3 English women did not appear on English commercial stages
until the Restoration. Thus, every play performed on a commercial stage in early
modern London was an MTF cross-gender performance of a sort, although critics
like Orgel suggest that the boys who played female roles were considered to be
much closer to femininity, having not fully grown into manhood yet.4 As Jennifer
Drouin points out in her work on differentiating cross-dressing, drag, and passing
as critical terms, “cross-dressing” in a Shakespearean context “is simply a
response to the practical constraint of the interdiction of women’s bodies on stage,
a question of clothes make the woman, analogous to props and settings that create
deadly weapons and exotic locales.”5 In Drouin’s view, theatrical cross-dressing
neither subverts gender roles nor manifests queer sexuality, since the audience
knows and expects the female characters to be boys misrepresenting themselves.
If audiences took any notice of cross-gender casting on the commercial stage, then
its presence might well have been designed to de-sensitize audiences to the potent
heterosexual themes of a performance. For antitheatricalists concerned that
audience members would be compelled by a play’s amorous scenes to
immediately enact the passions they’d witnessed from the stage, having all
amorous interactions take place between male actors and boy actors was a step
towards defusing heterosexual male excitement (oriented as it was presumed to be
30
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
towards the female form exclusively). Whether this worked, and boy actors really
did fail to “pass” as sexually desirable women, is impossible to determine. That
boys like Clerimont’s boy in Epicoene appear as objects of male and female
sexual desire suggests that there was something inherent to boyhood’s gender
fluidity that held an erotic charge.
Erotic desire for boys – often expressed by female characters like Olivia in
Twelfth Night or Lady Haughty in Epicoene but insinuated in close relationships
between male characters like Twelfth Night’s Orsino, As You Like It’s Orlando
and their cross-dressed boy pages — is something the all-male stage conceals but
also encourages through its tradition of enabling boys to pass as women without
actually becoming women. For Stephen Orgel, who is more interested in the
question of why English theatres and audiences supported all-male casts when
most continental theatres cast women in female roles, male cross-dressing is not a
neutral fact of stage history audiences routinely overlooked but a calculated
management of an audience’s erotic desire. Boy actors, Orgel argues, protect
audiences from the greater danger of female sexuality on stage. Although antitheatricalists deplored the practice of casting cross-dressed boys in feminine roles
because they believed it incited the spectator’s lust, Orgel convincingly argues
that “the love of men for men in this culture appears less threatening than the love
of men for women: it had fewer consequences, it was easier to de-sexualize, [and]
it figured and reinforced the patronage system.”6 “The reason always given for the
31
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
prohibition of women from the stage was that their chastity would thereby be
compromised,” Orgel continues, but behind this reason he sees “a real fear of
women’s sexuality, and more specifically, of its power to evoke men’s sexuality”
in a way that might render men less rational, less authoritative, and less
“masculine” by the society’s own standards.7 Boy actors, theoretically, protected
male spectators from experiencing excessive sexual desire for the heroines of any
given play.
The question Orgel poses – whether boys impersonating women pose a
greater threat to English patriarchal hierarchy than do women themselves – is one
I will explore at length in the coming chapters where pseudonymous parodies of
female writing sometimes work to discourage women’s participation in politics
and popular print. Orgel argues ultimately that boy actors were perceived as less
threatening than women themselves might have been on the commercial stage.
The threat Orgel traces in the antitheatrical literature of the period concerns an
audience’s sexual/affective response to an actor’s body – to the meta-performance
of gender and sexuality that underlies the text of a play. Orgel finds that anxieties
about the female body’s affective power over spectators override anxieties about
the cross-dressed male body so that while antitheatricalists find both
objectionable, the cross-dressed male body emerges as the safer vehicle through
which to tell the erotically-charged and often explicitly sexual stories of the early
modern commercial theatre.
32
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Orgel’s framing is ultimately useful in considering how an audience might
respond to female impersonation in other contexts (in print, for example) but my
focus on diegetic cross-dressing asks slightly different questions about the
subversive potential of women in early modern drama. If we can dismiss crossgender casting as an extended kind of “passing” in which we as an audience agree
to overlook the discrepancy between an actor’s sex and the gender of the character
he performs, then how does the introduction of older male characters performing
in drag affect the audience’s perceptions of passing?8 In scenes where male
characters in drag interact with female characters, do female characters still pose a
more potent threat to social order and patriarchal hierarchy because of their
sexuality? Or do men pose more of a threat because they can perform all of the
disorderly, outspoken behaviours of women without the liability of having a
female body?
Ben Jonson’s Epicoene valorizes and eroticizes boys who can easily adopt
and discard feminine identities while constructing the female body (which does
not itself appear on stage) as a liability for anyone trying to make it in the statusdriven London world of the play. Epicoene was first performed by the Children of
her Majesty’s Revels, a boys company, in December 1609-January 1610.9 The
play was performed entirely by boy actors but boy characters like Clerimont’s boy
from act 1 scene 1 and Epicoene highlight the erotic charge boys carry within the
play’s portrait of London society. While most of the boy actors perform the
33
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
somewhat-fixed gender of their characters, Epicoene and the boy play boy
characters able to convincingly and erotically take on feminine qualities without
actually becoming women. Clerimont’s servant, whom Clerimont’s friend
Truewit refers to as Clerimont’s “ingle at home,”10 recounts to Clerimont as
Clerimont is dressing that the women at the Ladies Collegiate “play with me, and
throw me o’ the bed, and carry me in to my lady, and she kisses me with her oiled
face, and puts a peruke o’ my head, and asks me an’I will wear her gown, and I
say no, and then she hits me a blow o’ the ear, and calls me innocent, and lets me
go” (1.1.12-6). The boy’s dialogue concerns an averted heterosexual encounter
between himself and the Ladies Collegiate, but in performance Clerimont’s
undress and the sense that he and Clerimont are together in a semi-intimate space
might well emphasize a homosexual erotic charge between the boy and
Clerimont, both of whom are played by young men. Clerimont’s jealous response
to the boy’s story – “Well sir, you shall go there no more” – suggests perhaps that
Clerimont is put out to find himself no longer young and androgynous enough to
appeal to the Ladies; his reaction at 1.1.17 –“No marvel if the door be kept shut
against your master when the entrance is so easy to you” – suggests that he might
wish himself to be in the boy’s position. Clerimont seems drawn to Lady Haughty
but the song he writes for the boy to sing in the first scene of the play is loaded
with barbs against cosmetics and fashion that are certain to offend her by spelling
out an ideal of natural, unadorned beauty to which she does not adhere. Given that
34
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
this dialogue takes place during a dressing room scene, where Clerimont has
presumably been adorning himself throughout, his position may come across as
laughably hypocritical or as a sign of the double standards that governed male and
female beautification practices. Clerimont’s song may be conventional, and it may
simply express his frustration that Lady Haughty prefers pliant boys to young
men. Then again, if we read Clerimont’s rejection of women’s fashion more metatheatrically as a rejection of clothing, cosmetics, and other exterior signifiers of
femininity that the boy actors playing the Ladies of the Collegiate wear, then
perhaps Clerimont is not rejecting women but is instead rejecting female disguise
– the disguises his fellow actors put on to perform as the Ladies Collegiate, for
instance.
Where the boy’s body passes into multiple spaces, roles, and identities, the
female body (or, rather, the fictional female bodies of the Ladies Collegiate)
proves to be a distinct liability in Epicoene. While dresses and wigs are at the
core of Lady Haughty’s erotic play with Clerimont’s boy, on the bodies of the
Ladies themselves dresses, wigs, and cosmetics become shameful facades to
conceal the repulsive female bodies beneath. Clerimont criticizes Lady Haughty’s
elaborate beauty regimen, crying “A pox of her autumnal face, her pieced
beauty!” (1.1.72). He then bids the boy to sing a song about powdered and
perfumed ladies for whom “All is not sweet, all is not sound” and calls for women
to abandon “all th’adulteries of art” and make “simplicity a grace” (1.1.82, 88,
35
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
84). Truewit responds to Clerimont’s song with a defence of women’s art in their
beautification (so long as they perfectly conceal their underlying bodily flaws and
defend from intruders the private space in which they get themselves ready).11 But
his support for artificial beauty products reveals underlying assumptions about
adult women’s bodies as always already flawed, decaying, or deformed. In act 4,
for instance, he opines to Clerimont that “Women ought to repair the losses time
and years have made i’ their features with dressings” and goes on to list the ways
a woman might conceal a lack of height, a misshapen foot, sour breath, or rotten
teeth (4.1.29-30). While boys, in part because of their youth, make female
clothing and cosmetics seem erotic, adult female characters in female clothing
draw censure even from their would-be suitors, and do not seem to command
nearly the same erotic appeal boys like Epicoene and Clerimont’s boy do. A boy’s
impersonation of a woman, the play implies, might actually be much more
arousing than a woman herself.
Truewit sees cosmetics as instrumental to women’s self-worth, a way to
“repair the losses of time” by recouping the ‘loss’ (presumably) of erotic capital.
But as Edith Snook writes in Women, Beauty and Power in Early Modern
England, “Beauty practices,” including women’s writing on beauty, cosmetics,
and hair styling, “were a form of knowledge that allowed women to participate in
scholarly culture, to raise politically knowing sons, to exert control within a
household and community, to be creative and ethical with their own appearance
36
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
and encourage the same in others.”12 “Attention to appearance,” Snook argues,
“could provide a means to express female subjectivity and self-governance.”13
Lady Haughty’s preoccupation with cosmetics, which in Truewit’s view appears
to be an attempt to recover fading erotic capital, might alternatively read as a bid
for increased social capital through self-expression and consumption. Truewit
compares the work of beautification to the work of a gilder in terms of its secrecy
– “You see gilders not work but enclosed. They must not discover how little
serves with the help of art to adorn a great deal” – but the reference to gilders’
“work” reminds us simultaneously that beauty for women is a form of
craftsmanship that can confer economic and social privileges. If Epicoene is as
sexually appealing as the other characters’ reactions to her would have us believe,
then Dauphine and Epicoene may have schooled themselves in conventional
feminine beauty practices. The peruke mentioned in the dramatic reveal of
Epicene’s sex is likely to have been only one of many costume, makeup, and
gestural choices coordinated by Dauphine and Epicoene (and by the acting
company) to create Epicoene’s female persona.
To have Clerimont remark upon Lady Haughty’s reliance on cosmetics
might also reinforce the play’s dichotomy between the aged, imperfect female
bodies of the Ladies Collegiate and the ideal body of the young male, which needs
no private, chemical alterations to be sexually desirable. When Clerimont’s boy
sings Clerimont’s song praising “Robes loosely flowing, hair as free / Such sweet
37
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
neglect more taketh me” he highlights his own unadorned beauty, his refusal to
put on Lady Haughty’s makeup in erotic play, and his master’s disgust that Lady
Haughty “wipes her oiled lips upon [him] like a sponge” (1.1. 85-6, 75). The song
calls for ladies to appear unadorned, while the beautiful lady who appears in the
play turns out to be another boy character called on to perform feminine beauty.
Epicoene’s youthful male body can construct feminine beauty through clothing,
hair, and cosmetic choices but whereas Clerimont and Truewit imply that women
apply cosmetics to conceal inadequacies, Epicoene has no physical vulnerabilities
to compensate for. Although Clerimont in act 4 comments to Truewit that “Lady
Haughty looks well today, for all my dispraise of her i’ the morning” (4.1.26-7)
and that he will come around to Truewit’s way of thinking that art enhances
female beauty, Clerimont’s complimentary assertion triggers for Truewit a long
list of ugly conditions cosmetics can conceal. Truewit’s defence of cosmetics does
not put the audience in mind of beauty – it instead reminds the audience of all the
imperfections that lie beneath a woman’s exterior appearance. Truewit and
Clerimont’s debate over cosmetics is conventional, but in Epicoene, where actors
really do use cosmetics and clothing to conceal bodies that are at odds with their
exterior appearances, the references to cosmetics remind audiences that women,
like actors, often construct personae for themselves by manipulating their outward
appearance. From Truewit’s perspective the charge against women is not that they
are false, it is that the female body sorely needs artificial enhancement to cover its
38
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
basic rankness: its “fat hand and scald nails,” its “sour breath,” (a complaint Otter
levels at his wife as well), its “black and rugged teeth” (4.1.34-8). Lady Haughty
advises in act 4 scene 3 that “ladies should be mindful of the approach of age,”
acknowledging that as a woman’s youth and desirability fades her ability to enjoy
suitors will diminish (35). While the aged Morose can interview young brides, a
lady of the College aims to spend her erotic capital while she is young before she
“may live to lie a forsaken beldame in a frozen bed” (4.3.38). Even the Collegiate
women, whose power resides in their sexual and financial independence, still
seem to expect that their options will narrow once their value as objects of desire
diminishes. The male body’s status as an erotic object also diminishes with age,
explaining perhaps why Lady Haughty finds Clerimont’s boy more desirable than
Clerimont himself. But since patriarchal hierarchies value senior males more
highly, male bodies continue to enjoy access to power in ways women do not
once their erotic capital is exhausted. Thus while Lady Haughty and Epicoene
both create enhanced female personae through clothing and makeup, removing
Epicoene’s disguise reveals a young male body coded in early modern England
and in the play as desirable and empowered. Removing Lady Haughty’s carefully
constructed exterior, on the other hand, would expose a flawed, aging female
body and cause Lady Haughty’s erotic capital to plummet in the eyes of gallants
like Clerimont and Truewit.
39
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
The play’s bias toward female impersonators over biological females
appears also in its portrayals of the two Amazonian wives who have yet to join the
Collegiate: Epicoene and Mistress Otter. Both wives achieve in their marriages an
unseemly dominance that shames and even injures their husbands.14 But while
Mistress Otter, the adult female character, remains irredeemably monstrous to the
trio of young male wits, Epicoene, the boy posing as Morose’s ideal bride, charms
everyone around him/her with her outspoken wit even as she defies her husband’s
will. Mistress Otter transgresses far more egregiously than Epicoene does when
she physically assaults her husband, but the remarks her husband makes about her
body are de-humanizing: drunk and unaware that Truewit has brought Mrs. Otter
within earshot, Otter calls his wife “a scurvy clogdogdo: an unlucky thing, a very
foresaid bear-whelp, without any good fashion or breeding,” a “Mala bestia”
whose expensive outer appearance conceals a rank, malodorous body (4.2.65-6).
Morose exclaims in horror that he has married an Amazon – “a Penthesilea, a
Semiramis” – but he at least grants his wife humanity where Otter ranks his wife
lower than the bears and horses that adorn the cups he fought to bring to Morose’s
wedding feast (1.1.48-9). Epicoene, the boy trained up by the androgynouslynamed Dauphine Eugenie to pass as a woman, draws her husband’s scorn as an
outspoken virago but unlike Otter s/he remains the focus of male sexual attraction
and female interest. Her suitors Daw and La Foole may be the gulls of the play,
but their amorous overtures reinforce to the other characters and to the audience
40
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
how convincing Epicoene’s femininity is (while retroactively suggesting to the
audience that they actually desire femininity more when it is performed by an
androgynous boy). Age certainly must factor into any possible comparison
between Mistress Otter and “Mistress Epicoene,” as Epicoene is the lone young
maiden character of the play and Mrs. Otter and the other Ladies are, we presume,
several years her senior (5.4.92). Yet the parallels between the two wives create
an interesting tension between Mistress Otter as a mannish woman who cannot
fully achieve the position of male head of household she wishes – she beats her
gossiping husband but is then chased out of Morose’s house by the phallic threat
of Morose’s sword – and Epicoene, the womanish man playing a mannish woman
who can be redeemed by the revelation of his underlying boyhood, which makes
his Amazonian behaviour a jest. The play-text gives frustratingly little to indicate
how the characters present in the final scene react to Dauphine’s scheme, so it is
difficult to draw conclusions about female impersonation and homoerotic desire
from this final revelation scene. Although most of the cast is on stage, only the
three gallants speak. Morose, the Ladies, Epicoene, Daw, and La Foole say
nothing and Dauphine asks them nothing. Dauphine does ask his two companions,
Clerimont and Truewit, to comment, but only Truewit celebrates Dauphine’s
triumph, turning it into a joke and moral lesson at the expense of Daw and La
Foole, perhaps as a means of distancing himself from them and distracting an
41
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
audience who might remember that of all the men enamoured with the silent
woman only he and Daw have kissed and been kissed by her (3.5.3-5).15
What conclusions does Epicoene offer about female impersonation on the
Jacobean stage? First, it supports the theory that the cross-dressing done by boy
actors was not necessarily drag – that is to say, the fact that an early modern
audience knows that all of the female costumes on stage conceal male bodies does
not mean that the boys who played women were not capable of passing as women
to their spectators. Epicoene’s passing, the play leads us to believe, is flawless and
invisible to the other characters and leads modern critics to suspect that such
passing was also invisible to early modern playhouse audiences who presumably
might have shared Morose’s surprise in the final scene at the reminder that
Epicoene is a fictional role performed by a boy. Epicoene’s performance does not
seem to falter at any point, nor is she an especially parodic version of femininity
when set against Mistress Otter. For an audience accustomed to overlooking any
gender discrepancy between an actor’s sex and the role that actor performs, there
is also no reason to believe Epicoene’s passing would have attracted attention
unless the actor and/or the company chose to draw attention to it in performance.
The satirical portrayals of the women in power, however, who Truewit
says exert a “hermaphroditical authority,” (1.1.68) lead Helen Ostovich to
consider the rich possibilities of casting “larger, older boys” to play Mistress Otter
and perhaps the Ladies Collegiate as “grotesques.”16 Indeed, Mistress Otter in
42
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
particular comes off as an extreme and one-dimensional parody of a class-climber
and an overbearing wife and the scene in which she beats her husband mimics the
kind of domestic disorder that was sometimes addressed in communities by crossdressing rituals like the Skimmington ritual discussed in my introduction. The
second thing Epicoene tells us about MTF cross-dressing in Jacobean drama, then,
is that if we look at the ways cross-dressing, passing, and drag function within the
plots of the plays themselves we can see that males who perform femininity
sometimes hold on to their masculine privilege from beneath their disguise.
Epicoene’s performance as an overbearing wife receives much more sympathetic
treatment than Mrs. Otter’s does, perhaps in large part because Epicoene is
rewarded for having temporarily and cleverly performed disorderly womanhood.
Mistress Otter’s aggressive desire to rise up the ranks of London society
(expressed in her violent attempts to ameliorate her low-class husband’s manners)
seems natural to a male head of a household but irreconcilable with her
unchanging sex. While women clearly engage in social climbing in early modern
drama, Mistress Otter’s efforts to control her husband and gain membership in the
exclusive Ladies Collegiate signal to the audience that her transgressive
masculine dominance is boorish, and not sophisticated like Lady Haughty’s.
While Epicoene as an androgynous boy can pass as a woman, Mistress Otter’s
attempts at masculine authority come off as a monstrous drag performance that
transgresses both gender and class distinctions. And Dauphine, the author of
43
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
“Epicoene,” the supposedly-silent female persona he can use to trap Morose into
marrying, reaps the fullest reward for orchestrating disorderly female behaviour.
As Epicoene demonstrates, MTF passing and the phenomenon of the boy
actor performing a female role are not necessarily transgressive. If passing itself
were transgressive, we might expect Dauphine and Epicoene to be shamed at the
end of the play by the revelation of Epicoene’s sex. Instead, the characters who
accepted Epicoene as a female (and the audience who accepted her as a female
character) are stunned and possibly shamed at having been tricked. Drouin invests
FTM passing practices with more subversive potential than drag in her
articulation of early modern dramatic cross-dressing because “passing is always
subversive at the moment of its exposure” and often risks violent reprisal.17 The
moment of exposure in Epicoene is subversive because it reveals Dauphine’s plot
to compel Morose into reinstating him as his heir, but the exposure is restorative
too in that it frees Morose from his marriage to a ‘woman’ he cannot control.
Epicoene’s unruly femininity turns out to be a female persona crafted and paid for
by Dauphine and performed by a witty boy. The moment of exposure in Epicoene
is thus a moment to contain gender transgression, not provoke it. Mistress Otter’s
Amazonian masculinity, on the other hand, is only contained to the extent that an
audience sides against her for her aggressive behaviour and class-climbing and
not against her husband. Their conflict, and Mrs. Otter’s conflict with the College
of Ladies she wishes desperately to impress, remains unresolved in the play. Thus
44
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
while MTF passing is a useful tool for Dauphine in his bid to secure his place in
the lower echelons of the upper class, cross-gender performances like Mrs. Otter’s
which tend to slip into parodic drag serve to trope disorder and punish women’s
attempts to rise above their own class- and gender-based oppressions. Such MTF
performances of disorderly femininity, when they shift from instances of passing
to instances of drag, demonstrate how MTF impersonation scapegoats women for
an unruliness and social mobility that the culture at large finds both fascinating
and terrifying.
MTF drag in a festive context often upholds, rather than challenges,
patriarchal structures, as it does in Skimmington rituals in which the cross-dressed
Lady Skimmington enacts violent, problematic dominance over an abased
husband as a means of reinforcing the community’s standards of appropriate male
dominance and female subservience in marriage. In Epicoene, however, crossdressing does not serve to reinforce patriarchal marriage norms. Morose, the
play’s figure of inadequate masculine authority, seeks a marriage that is rigidly
patriarchal in that he expects his silent future wife to have literally zero input on
their family affairs. Morose fails to control Epicoene in their marriage, but
Epicoene’s sudden lack of silent modesty signals that Morose has been tricked.
Dauphine’s scheme uses cross-dressing to sabotage and finally invalidate his
uncle’s legitimate wish to perform the ideal duty of a patriarch and produce heirs
to inherit his estate. The play celebrates masculine wit and energy, but it does not
45
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
in fact celebrate patriarchy, if we take patriarchy to mean the social order in which
senior males rule hierarchically over subordinate younger men, women, children,
and servants. In fact, Dauphine’s scheme to make himself his uncle’s heir seems
to forestall the work of seeking a fortune for himself through marriage or work
and thereby establishing himself as a patriarch. In the final scene of the play
Morose appears chastened and punished but in no way converted or changed by
the critique that his desire for a silent, completely subservient wife has received.
Suffering the shame of having married a female impersonator (although perhaps
the revelation comes as a relief, since it means the end of his unhappy marriage),
Morose remains silent. Like Mistress Otter, Morose is humiliated for his
perceived failure to perform his proper role in his marriage and remains shamed
but unredeemed. Epicoene’s cross-dressing critiques Morose’s intolerance of
noise and his self-centred insistence that he alone be allowed to speak,18 but it
ultimately rewards Dauphine for working out a scheme of inheritance that
bypasses women completely and undermines marriage as the core unit of
patriarchal social order.
Amazonian Disguise and Female Erotic Agency in Swetnam the WomanHater
Although MTF passing serves in Epicoene as a means to shame Morose,
the ineffectual patriarch, MTF cross-dressing – and drag in particular – can also
46
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
be a powerful tool in redeeming patriarchs who have become tyrannous. Women
characters who play boys/men, like Rosalind in As You Like It, gain considerable
masculine privilege through their masculine disguises but use this privilege in the
main to restore a disrupted social order that their older male counterparts have
jeopardized. Jonson’s play deals with the problematic nature of (Morose’s)
patriarchy by silencing the older male patriarch and in effect excluding him from
the denouement. Swetnam the Woman-Hater, another play in which a male
protagonist, Lorenzo, adopts an Amazonian female disguise for nearly all of the
play,19 highlights the role that drag can play in recuperating an old patriarch (in
this case Lorenzo’s father, the King of Sicily) into a restored patriarchal order.
The restorative disguise plots of As You Like It and Swetnam the WomanHater bring about social cohesion through the transformation of older male
patriarchs in ways that contain female sexuality and agency within a Christian
heterosexual, reproductive logic. Whereas we understand how masculine disguise
might empower female characters like Rosalind and others to take on tyrants and
usurpers, however, the paths to empowerment through female disguise are far less
clear and consistent. Looking specifically at MTF drag’s restorative role in
Swetnam the Woman-Hater, I will argue that female impersonation enables
characters to perform a kind of social critique of patriarchy focused on the
regulation of female erotic agency. Lorenzo, the cross-dressed prince in Swetnam
the Woman-Hater, illustrates that cross-dressing can be both a tool for reforming a
47
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
gender system in crisis (a crisis exemplified by the male character’s need to crossdress in the first place) and a mechanism for restoring that system to order (by
restoring the character to his position of masculine privilege). I will explore how
the prince’s cross-dressing might clarify what it meant for men to assume female
personae in self-referential, parodic ways, and what role this kind of drag plays in
organizing, conducting, and controlling sexual energies which pose a threat to
patriarchal order.
Swetnam the Woman-Hater throws Swetnam, a character based on the
pamphlet controversy’s misogynistic instigator Joseph Swetnam, into the plot of a
popular fifteenth-century Spanish novelette by Juan De Flores that was adapted
and translated multiple times into English, French, and Italian over the course of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.20 Swetnam’s first appearance reveals that
he has been exiled from England and is on the run from the mobs of women who
object violently to his pamphlet. He takes refuge in Sicily as a fencing master
working under the alias of “Misogynos” until he finds a way to insert himself into
the Sicilian court as the champion for men in the romance plot’s battle of the
sexes. Ann Rosalind Jones posits that, ironically, “the popularity of Swetnam’s
pamphlet, rather than silencing women, gave them a justification for writing
against it” and that “the public space opened up by popular printing legitimates
new roles for women.”21 The play, Jones argues, does the opposite and shuts
down opportunities for women’s public critique of misogyny by making Swetnam
48
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
into little more than “a comic butt.”22 “[T]he stage figure [of Swetnam] in no way
measures up to [the female responders’] verbal portrait of [him] as a producer of
strangled, inflated prose,” Jones writes; “[t]he forensic skill and ad hominem
challenges of the pamphlets are suppressed by the visual and kinetic requirements
of dramatic action.”23 Leonida and Lorenzo’s star-crossed love affair, which
actually consumes more stage time than the titular Swetnam plot does,
“subordinates the analysis of misogyny and the defence of women to issues of
princely virtue and proper kingship.”24 My analysis of Swetnam differs from
Jones’s argument in that I see the romance plot and the Swetnam pamphlet plot
working together to create a different kind of anti-patriarchal critique than existed
in either source. Lorenzo, as the cross-dressed prince, provides the bridge between
the female defences of women key to the Swetnam plot and the issues of princely
virtue and kingship that animate the romance plot. But while Jones suggests that
issues of kingship distract or take away from a critique of misogyny, I would
argue that issues of proper kingship go hand in hand with the play’s critique of
misogyny, since the issues at stake in King Atticus’s tyranny concern his son’s
gender and his daughter’s sexuality. Pairing the tragic novelette and the comic
pamphlet controversy works therefore to illustrate that overt misogyny – whether
it takes the form of open hostility towards womankind, violence against women,
or tyrannical control over women’s sexuality – is a legitimate threat to patriarchal
order that must be countered and disarmed in order to facilitate a more covert,
49
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
systemic misogyny which affords disproportionate agency to adult men. King
Atticus, like Morose, holds extreme beliefs about how far his authority as a
patriarch extends (Morose is only willing to marry a silent woman and Atticus
agrees to execute his daughter after she has premarital sex) and it is up to his
younger male heir to correct and soften these beliefs through MTF disguise plots.
Morose, given his advanced age and character flaws, may be beyond reform and
as a householder without a wife and children the impact of his misogyny will be
limited. But Atticus’s tyranny, the play demonstrates, can have deadly
consequences. While Jonson does not reform or redeem Morose in any significant
way in Epicoene, the final act of Swetnam is dedicated to Atticus’s re-education
and redemption. In this act, Lorenzo’s female disguise and his use of theatricality
more generally bring about change in the king. While the play does curb women’s
ability to effectively critique patriarchal privilege from the outside, it highlights
instead the means by which the extremes of patriarchal privilege might be
attacked from within, as the play puts forward a prince in women’s clothing as its
hero.
The play opens with the news that Atticus’s eldest son, Lusyppus, has
died, and that his second son, Lorenzo, went missing eighteen months before at
the battle of Lepanto and has either died or been made a Turkish captive. Atticus’s
extreme grief at the loss of his two sons sets up the central tragicomic plot of the
play by putting intense pressure on Atticus’s remaining heir, Leonida. Since her
50
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
“female Sexe cannot inherit here,” Atticus notes that “One must injoy both her
and Sicilie,” conflating possession of her sexuality with possession of the throne
(1.1.90-1). By the end of this first scene, Atticus has ordered his councillor,
Nicanor, to confine Leonida and see that she be “Princely vs’d; but no accesse /
By any to her presence, but by such / As we shall send, or giue commandment for:
/ Tis death to any other dares attempt it” (1.1.167-70). Ultimately, however, when
her true love Lisandro does scheme his way into her chamber and her bed, it is
Leonida that the Sicilian court condemns to death. Because Atticus is unwilling,
as a father, to intervene or challenge the misogynistic ruling of his court on the
question of which sex is more guilty in matters of love, Atticus proves that he is
unfit to rule Sicily. Upholding the court’s sentence that women (i.e., Leonida) are
to blame in matters of love turns Atticus into a tyrant in the eyes of his people, in
part because a patriarch’s relationship with his dependents was a powerful
metaphor for a king’s relationship with his subjects. He argues convincingly that
as a king and patriarch, he must be impartial and uphold the sentence of the court,
but his inflexibility in meting out the court’s misogynistic punishment proves to
be a serious flaw in Sicily’s patriarchal order.
Misogyny taken to its furthest extremes, as Jones points out, encourages
public outcry against the system. This outcry spills forth in act 4 of the play, when
the women of Sicily band together to put Swetnam on trial for his role in
Leonida’s sentencing, but whether their acts against Swetnam constitute an act
51
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
against the system deserves further exploration. Either way, the play demonstrates
that women are not the only group who stands to gain by voicing objections to
Swetnam’s pamphlets. Patriarchs themselves prove to have a considerable stake in
expelling overt and unruly misogyny from their domains. Atticus fails to defend
his daughter against Swetnam’s slander, but by assuming his Amazon disguise
and championing his sister’s cause against Swetnam, Lorenzo acts in his own selfinterest. In the Swetnam pamphlet controversy, and indeed in Swetnam the
Woman-Hater, masculine agents assume female personae as a means of dealing
with the troubling implications of female sexual agency in a patriarchal system
attentive to but anxious about female sexual pleasure as a function of female
reproduction. Through his female disguise Lorenzo gains insights into the
affective needs of his subjects and his future kingdom that are completely lost on
the king, who sees his daughter’s sexuality only in rigid terms of its political
function. Lorenzo’s drag performance provides a way of managing the threat
Leonida’s antisocial sexual desire poses to Sicily.
Before we are even introduced to Leonida, Atticus has portrayed her as a
sexually disruptive force that threatens the stability of the land. Atticus’s
description of his own daughter rivals the misogynistic portrayal of female
sexuality that Swetnam, a few scenes later, will construct in the trial at court.
According to Atticus Leonida is “wanton, coy, and fickle too: / How many
Princes hath the froward Elfe / Set at debate, desiring but her loue? / What
52
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
dangers may insue?” (1.1.162-5). Later we learn that several suitors have already
killed themselves because Leonida refused them – a detail which resonates against
Leonida given how heavily the first scene of the play emphasizes the grief and
turmoil the death of the young princes brings to Sicily. Although we might read
her as an unobtainable Petrarchan mistress, Leonida holds a destructive power
that seems to be far more immediate, violent, and threatening than is typical of the
stereotype. Leonida’s destructive power in the play is nevertheless a milder
version of Isabell’s power in the 1608 multi-language translation of the play’s
source text, Histoire de Aurelio et Isabell. In the De Flores source text Isabell is
said to be so beautiful “that whatsoeuer man that was vnto the louely passions
disposed, soudenly when he had sene her, was constrayned to bide her seruante:
and so streyghtly, that who beheld her, burned for her, suche that many died.”25
The rash of deaths in the romance pressures the king to enclose his daughter in a
castle in the countryside. Female sexuality, in both the source and the anonymous
play, therefore poses a direct threat to society. In enclosing Leonida, Atticus
arguably tries to ensure that there will be no further young male casualties.
Atticus’s motivations, however, seem far more self-serving than this. If
what makes Leonida threatening is her erotic agency – her ability to choose or
reject a suitor – then Atticus has the option of simply allowing her to choose.
Atticus says of Leonida in the opening scene “She’s all the comfort we haue left
Vs now; / She must not haue her libertie to match,” suggesting that his reasons for
53
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
enclosing her have far more to do with the danger she poses to Atticus’s dynastic
legacy than with the danger she poses to love-struck young men.26 As we learn in
the first scene, Leonida has already chosen the prince of Naples, Lisandro, as her
husband. Atticus rejects Lisandro, whose princely status makes him a respectable
match for Leonida, because of tensions between himself and the King of Naples,
tensions which make the match either politically or personally unacceptable to
Atticus himself. Atticus has no legal recourse (in England, anyway) to force his
daughter to consent to a marriage she does not want, even if he objects to her
choice, but if he believes Leonida to be “wanton, coy, and fickle” he perhaps
assumes that she will be easily distracted from Lisandro. In charging Nicanor with
her care, Atticus has actually put Leonida at greater risk. Nicanor’s scheme to
pester Leonida until she consents to their marriage enables a disguised Lisandro to
infiltrate Leonida’s chamber and reaffirm her devotion to him (on the pretense
that the disguised Lisandro will advance Nicanor’s suit). The logic behind
confining Leonida to the castle is the patriarchal logic that views female
reproductive potential as a commodity owned by a woman’s male relatives. By
confining Leonida’s body, Atticus believes he will enforce chastity upon his
daughter and block any attempts at producing a new heir to the throne. Pierre
Bourdieu, a French theorist and anthropologist, writes about marriage in early
modern France as a set of strategies designed to motivate and even indoctrinate
individuals into preserving a family’s land, wealth, and status through strict
54
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
control of heirs. Although French and English marriage traditions are not
identical, Bourdieu’s view of marriage as a series of strategic, transactional
behaviours unconsciously incorporated into a community’s daily routines
provides a useful model to think through how early modern English audiences
interpreted a character’s attitudes towards marriage and partner choices. Bourdieu
argues that for early modern families “all means were justified when it came to
protecting the integrity of the patrimony.”27 Atticus’s methods are extreme, but
Leonida is the sole heir to the kingdom, and as Bourdieu notes, although heirs
receive the highest privilege they also pay a high price by “subordinating [their]
own interest[s] to those of the lineage.”28 As Bourdieu writes, parents, who “on
other occasions, felt free to bend the custom in order to satisfy their own
inclinations” by permitting their children to accumulate financial stakes “felt
duty-bound to prohibit a misalliance and to force their children, regardless of
feeling, into unions that were best suited to safeguard the social system by
safeguarding the position of the lineage within that system.”29 In the first scene
we likewise learn that Atticus has been permissive with his younger children in
the past, allowing his younger son Lorenzo to go off to join the Christian League
against the Turks and permitting his daughter to entertain a variety of foreign
princes. While Atticus might under different circumstances put a higher priority
on Leonida’s freedom and feelings, her new and unexpected role as sole heir in
55
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
light of her brothers’ reported deaths means that he must now require her to
sacrifice her desires and her “libertie” to the service of the patrimony.
Bourdieu theorizes that in most cases marriage strategies function to keep
individual desires in harmony with what best serves the patrimony. “A really
well-designed marriage strategy,” he writes, “tended to avoid conflicts between
duty and feeling, between reason and passion, between collective interest and
individual interest.”30 Upbringing, early learning, and social experiences “tended
to model [individuals’] schemes of perception and appreciation, in a word, their
tastes, which since they played as large a role in their selection of a sexual partner
as in other areas, led them to avoid improper alliances, even aside from
considerations of a properly economic or social nature.”31 First sons in particular
were subject to the formative pressures of this system. Since Leonida has grown
up with two brothers, though, she has not had the same formative conditioning
that her elder brother Lusyppus, Atticus’s first-born son, has had and rebels
against her sudden change of status. While Lorenzo, the second-born son, would
have been the closest substitute to Lusyppus by virtue of age, gender, and
moulding, Leonida’s sex makes her the least likely of Atticus’s children to have
been successfully conditioned to bypass her personal preferences in marriage for
the sake of preserving the patrimony. As the daughter of a king who already has
two male heirs, Leonida’s choice of Lisandro (a prince of the neighbouring
kingdom of Naples) is an appropriate one since it might productively strengthen
56
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
the relationships between their kingdoms of Sicily and Naples without disrupting
either family’s patrimony or upsetting the balance between the two families. Now
that she is Sicily’s sole heir, however, Leonida endangers Sicily with her desire
for Lisandro because Leonida as Lisandro’s wife would be subordinate to
Lisandro and would thus make Sicily subordinate to Naples, a prospect Atticus
rejects.32 The conflict of the play arises, then, not because of the chaos of
forbidden love (although this is a common trope of early modern drama and
proves key to the original romance plot) but because the deaths of Lusyppus and
Lorenzo necessitate an abrupt shift in the royal family’s marriage strategy that the
family struggles to cope with. If patriarchal hierarchy did not subordinate Leonida
to her husband, Leonida could assume her brothers’ position as heir to the throne
without jeopardizing Sicily’s political independence. It is only because marriage
is patriarchal, in other words, that Leonida’s erotic agency is problematic. Facing
the death and disappearance of its two male heirs, Sicilians could challenge their
laws against female inheritance to retain Leonida as an heir equal to either of her
brothers. Rather than reform laws which benefit male heirs, Lorenzo in his
Amazon disguise reforms Sicilian attitudes towards female sexuality,
demonstrating how female impersonation in Swetnam helps patriarchal systems
stay resilient in the face of challenges to its fundamental inequalities.
Leonida’s imprisonment, for all that it is a sound marriage strategy, does
not ultimately curb her erotic agency. Lisandro gains access to Leonida’s chamber
57
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
with the help of Leonida’s maid the pair pledge their lives to each other, and after
Loretta’s instruction that Lisandro “look my Ladie dye no Nun” the couple exits
(we can presume) to have sex offstage (2.2.100-4).33 Leonida and Lisandro are
soon betrayed, caught, and put on trial to determine which of them should receive
the death penalty and which should merely be banished for seducing the other. As
in the novelette, the trial of the two young offenders escalates into a trial of the
sexes, where the question before the court becomes whether men or women bear
the ultimate responsibility for lustful, extramarital sexuality. Summons go out for
male and female champions to defend their respective sexes at the trial and
Swetnam’s misogynistic rhetoric is an easy substitute for the rhetoric of Affranio,
the knight who champions men in the novelette. Putting the cross-dressed prince
Lorenzo into the role of the female champion, however, presents a striking
departure from the source. Hortensia, the female champion in Aurelio et Isabell, is
a learned woman experienced in love and not an Amazon. She presents a
righteous defence of women, and a condemnation of the trial, but she performs
none of the deception, manipulation, and stagecraft Lorenzo performs as Atlanta
to turn the tragedy into a comedy. The novelette is pure tragedy – the king
adamantly sacrifices his daughter to an abstract notion of justice despite his
queen’s pleas for mercy, Aurelio throws himself onto the fire in order to take
Isabell’s place in the last seconds before she is about to be put to death, and after
Aurelio dies Isabell throws herself into a courtyard of lions to be devoured alive.
58
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Hortensia, the queen, and her gentlewomen take their revenge on Affranio (who
has hypocritically fallen in love with Hortensia) by torturing him for days, tearing
him apart, throwing him onto the fire, and then collecting his ashes to wear
around their necks as a token. Swetnam the Woman-Hater rejects this brutal
ending. Although Leonida is led to her execution and Lisandro tries to kill
himself, both lovers live and the king learns the value of mercy. Swetnam is
tormented, but repents at the end of the play and is redeemed. That
Lorenzo/Atlanta almost single-handedly effects the tragicomic turn of the play
suggests that the playwright’s choice to adapt his role from female champion to
cross-dressed prince is crucial to the play’s overall message about the problematic
extremes patriarchs like Atticus resort to in policing female erotic agency and
preserving patrimony.
Lorenzo returns to Sicily in disguise in scene 3 of the first act, after
Atticus has given him up for dead and refuses to let any of the nobles go out to
search for him. Whether he returns in disguise because he is ashamed at having
been defeated and captured at Lepanto or not, he tells Iago, his sole confidant, that
he intends to stay in disguise to “obserue the times and humors of the Court”
(1.3.103) since “Happie’s that Prince, that ere he rules shall know, / Where the
chiefe errors of his State doe grow” (1.3.117-8).34 Lorenzo’s disguise in this scene
is that of a nondescript male, but in act 3 scene 2 Lorenzo abandons this
unremarkable disguise for the far more attention-drawing disguise of Atlanta the
59
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Amazon. The stage directions make it clear to the reader of the play that Atlanta
the foreign female is actually Lorenzo the native male (3.2.sd), and Lorenzo’s
expressed intent to travel in disguise through the kingdom that he will one day
inherit (1.3.102-3) should also lead the audience to suspect that Atlanta the
Amazon is the prince in disguise, even if they do not recognize that the characters
are played by the same actor.
I have argued elsewhere that Lorenzo’s Amazon disguise serves as a
vehicle through which he reasserts his masculinity after his capture by Turks at
the battle of Lepanto.35 But while I have read Lorenzo as an emasculated figure
whose gender is in transition, I think it is also possible to read Lorenzo
productively as a man in drag – a man whose performance of femininity is
“almost but not quite” right, to borrow Drouin’s definition of drag, in that its
Amazonian elements self-referentially draw attention to the instability and
artificiality of the gender it is attempting to perform. Lorenzo’s Amazon disguise
is perhaps no more convincing of femininity to the audience than a Wiltshire man
disguising himself as Lady Skimmington would be to a Wiltshire crowd. The
Amazon, like the Skimmington, is a fiction of female subjectivity that parodies
female agency and renders female violence burlesque. As drag performances they
both subvert and subtly reinforce the norms which regulate a binary view of
gender. “Given the entrenched associations between women and weakness and all
the other cultural constraints imposed upon women,” Valerie Wayne writes, “the
60
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
amazon, who combined masculine strength with feminine sympathies, was one of
the best available candidates to perform the disorderly woman and mount an
effective defence of women against men’s physical and verbal attacks.”36
Morose’s shock at Epicoene’s “Amazonian impudence” seems disproportionate
and ridiculous in the context of his marriage – Epicoene is only speaking to
guests and welcoming visitors into what is now her house, behaviours that the rest
of London society would not typically consider Amazonian at all (3.5.34). But the
trope of the Amazon signals even in Epicoene that Epicoene’s performance of
outspoken femininity is a challenge and corrective to Morose’s misogynistic
views about marriage. Lorenzo’s Amazon disguise, which enables him to enter
public debates, challenge misogynists to duels, and direct important state
ceremonies like the execution of Leonida and a masque for the king and court as a
woman demonstrates to an even greater extent how MTF cross-dressing and drag
in particular can temper extreme misogyny like Swetnam’s and Atticus’s and
reinforce a milder system of patriarchal order in which women will be less
compelled to rebel or agitate for social change.
Wayne notes how disappointing it is that Lorenzo should reinforce the
limitations placed on women, further emphasizing their inability to defend
themselves from misogynist invective and indeed from the kinds of restrictions
and violence Leonida suffers. To borrow from Harvey’s articulation of the
ventriloquized voice, Lorenzo “uses the metaphor of woman as a lever for
61
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
dismantling certain patriarchal values, but, unlike the heroine he ventriloquizes,
he simultaneously partakes of the very privilege he seeks to expose.”37 Still,
although Lorenzo is a flawed and imperfect feminist hero, we might be
encouraged by the way Lorenzo in drag manages to champion female sexual
freedom within a culture fundamentally anxious about female sexuality’s
destructive powers. While in Aurelio et Isabell female sexuality and male desire
are a self-perpetuating cycle of destruction, destroying friendships between men,
destroying young men in their prime, destroying lovers, and eventually even
destroying men like Affranio who pretend to be impervious, Lorenzo/Atlanta
recuperates female sexuality and teaches the people of Sicily (including his father)
to embrace it as a pro-social force for good through elaborate, affective acts of
performance.
Although Lorenzo states early in the play that he plans to adopt his
disguise to observe the court, he quickly intervenes in the court’s affairs when a
call goes out for a female champion to defend Leonida in the upcoming trial.
Lorenzo’s intercession at the trial proves unsuccessful, though. In the trial he opts,
as Sowernam and Munda did, to counter Swetnam’s attacks against womankind
with attacks of his own against mankind, losing his temper at one point and
launching into invective so indecorous that the judges correct him. The court
decides in Swetnam’s favour, and although the queen begs Atticus to intercede to
save Leonida from execution, the king upholds the court’s ruling. Having failed to
62
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
convince the judges to spare Leonida, Lorenzo turns his attentions instead to
changing the people’s feelings towards Leonida through a moving, public
dumbshow and a fake execution that lead them to re-evaluate the connection
Atticus and Swetnam draw between female sexuality and violence.
Before the dumbshow, Iago is the only Sicilian nobleman to speak out
against the king’s decision to uphold the judges’ ruling. When Sforza, another
councillor, recounts the events of the trial to Iago, Iago immediately concludes,
“to say the truth, / Both Sexes equally should beare the blame / For both offend
alike” and is shocked to hear that the princess has been sentenced to death
(4.1.11-3). “A sentence most vniust, and tyrannous,” he exclaims, “’Twas cruell
in a King, for such a fact; / But in a father, it is tyranny” (4.1.23, 31-2). Whether
an audience would agree with Iago that Atticus is behaving like a tyrant is
questionable. As unfeeling as Atticus appears to be in the trial scene, the stakes of
Leonida’s criminal pre-marital sex are important in a real, dynastic sense. Atticus
has gone out of his way to surrender the decision to the courts of Sicily, and even
if Lisandro were the guiltier of the two, killing him does nothing to solve the
problem Leonida’s deflowered body poses to Sicily’s already imperiled dynastic
monarchy. Moreover, the fact that Iago characterizes the sentence as tyranny does
not mean that the rest of Sicily does. When Iago asks Sforza to “ioyne with me;
we’le to the King / And see if wee can alter this decree, / Oh, ‘tis a royal
Princesse, faire and chaste!” (4.1.79-81), Sforza counters that “her disdaine, my
63
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Lord, hath bin the cause / Of many hopefull Youths vntimely end; / ’Tis that has
hardene’d both the Commons hearts, / And many noble Peeres” (4.1.82-5).
Putting aside Atticus’s tyranny, Sforza suggests that it is Leonida’s sexuality the
people fear and her death that they prefer.
The dumbshow, however, changes the way the people of Sicily come to
regard Leonida and the threat of her sexuality. After the sentencing,
Lorenzo/Atlanta begs Atticus for the privilege of overseeing Leonida’s execution
to ensure that she will not “basely / Be hurried forth amongst vnciull men”
(3.3.285-6). Under Lorenzo/Atlanta’s direction, the dumbshow that depicts
Leonida’s walk towards execution is neither hurried nor male-dominated; it
features “two mourners, Atlanta with the Axe, Leonida all in white, her hair loose,
hung with ribans, supported on eyther side by two Ladies, Aurelia [the queen]
following as chiefe Mourner” (4.2.49-53). The sex of the two first mourners isn’t
specified, Lorenzo/Atlanta is in drag, and all of the actors on stage are male.
Female characters still far outweigh male ones in this scene, however. As
mourners, the characters onstage also claim a position powerfully associated with
femininity in the public sphere. Patricia Phillipy writes that “in the absence of
professional undertakers, early modern women were the most frequent and
immediate attendants on bodies in death, fulfilling not only the emotive rites of
mourning but also the more mundane tasks.”38 “In light of these necessary
material practices,” Phillippy argues, “the figurative association of women with
64
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
death takes on specific forms of ideological and affective power” that establish
feminine mourning as “a recognized site of particularly volatile, powerful
expression for women – fertile ground on which to establish their rights to public
speech.”39 While the judges silence women during the trial for their vocal support
of Atlanta, reproaching them with the reminder “you haue no voice in Court,”
women’s silence during the dumbshow only heightens the affective power of their
message as mourners (3.3.141). The message of the dumbshow is that although
Leonida’s execution seems as though it will mend the torn social fabric of Sicily
(for all the reasons I explained above), her death will actually disturb a more
fundamental, natural order.
As the actors pass wordlessly across the stage, a “Song in Parts” paints
Leonida’s death as a crime against nature. This song – the only song in the play –
increases the affective power of Leonida’s impending execution and provides an
opportunity to rethink the rationale that necessitates the beautiful young princess’s
death. The text doesn’t specify when the song begins or who sings it, but if we
imagine it as an accompaniment to the procession, which is directed to “pase
softly ouer the stage,” we can imagine that the twenty-four lines of the song gave
the procession reason to move slowly over the stage and to linger, allowing the
audience to fully take in the weight of the violence about to be done (4.2.52-3).
The lyrics also call on the audience to respond to Leonida’s death affectively
rather than rationally (as Atticus fails to, and as the court failed to by reducing her
65
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
trial to a raucous and coarse battle of the sexes). The song uses the tropes of
pastoral elegy to highlight how unnatural Leonida’s death appears by creating a
sense of empathy between the dirge singers and the natural realm in lines like
“Let the Woods and Valleys ring / Ecchoes to our sorrowing" (4.2.55-8). The
song then re-writes Leonida’s beauty so that it comes to signify youth and vitality
rather than destruction and death. The singers refer to Leonida as Nature’s
“chiefest prize,” in which “All the Stocke of beautie dies” (4.2.65-6). What
“cruell heart can long Forbeare to sing this sad” song, the singers ask the
audience, appealing to them to let themselves be caught up in the sadness and feel
pity for Leonida (4.2.67-8). The singers call on “Fawnes,” “Siluans,” “Nimphes,”
and “Sauage Beasts” for empathy, and all of these creatures take Leonida’s side,
proving themselves “more milder then / The unrelenting hearts of men” (4.2.714). The dumbshow, like the trial, appeals to the Red Bull audience to become
Leonida’s judge and to rule on whether her sexuality presents a danger to Sicilian
society that warrants her death.
Although we can’t know that the dumbshow changed the way the
historical audience viewed Leonida – we are probably best to assume that the
audience was divided, perhaps even along sex lines, during the trial scene – we
can observe a change in how the other characters within the play’s fiction
perceive Leonida’s crime and Atticus’s justice after the dumbshow. After a brief
interlude involving Swetnam and Swash in which Swetnam’s lust for Atlanta
66
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
rekindles the cycle of destructive sexual desire that doomed Leonida, the
playwright shifts our attention back to the Sicilian court with a very short scene
between “two gentlemen” discussing the fates of Leonida and Lisandro. The way
the gentlemen frame Leonida’s execution as a tragedy differs significantly from
the way Sforza framed it a few scenes earlier as the will of the people. The first
gentleman remarks that Leonida’s beheading was “The wofull’st sight that ere
mine eyes beheld” and calls it “a piece of the extremest Iustice” (4.4.6). “A sight
of greife and horror,” the second confirms, and adds that “in a Father” the act was
most extreme (4.4.6-8). Whereas before only Queen Aurelia and Iago censured
Atticus and pleaded to save the princess, now the gentlemen, speaking for the
Sicilian nobility, adopt the perspective of the song in noting the sad horror of
Leonida’s death and confirming that it was a more extreme punishment than they
expected (despite Atticus and Sforza’s belief that it was what they, the people of
Sicily, wanted). If we suppose that the reactions of the Sicilian people are
intended to inform, echo, or elicit the same reaction the play wishes to elicit from
the theatre’s audience, then the dumbshow also changes the audience’s
perspective on Leonida. The next scene brings this horror to a new height when a
guard enters and reveals Leonida’s corpse. The sight of Leonida’s body triggers
Lisandro’s suicide, the only suicidal behaviour from a male suitor we actually see
in the play. Lisandro’s attempted suicide ironically threatens to negate the
protection Leonida’s death might have provided to the young men so prone to
67
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
dying for her when she was alive. As these two scenes illustrate, the dumbshow
marks a turning point in the play where the destructive power that had been
invested in Leonida’s body shifts to the royal body of Atticus, the patriarch turned
tyrant, soon being displaced onto Swetnam, the far more accessible embodiment
of the misogyny that led the people of Sicily astray during the trial.
Lorenzo/Atlanta’s initial deception – his drag performance – comes to
represent the powers of deception and stagecraft more broadly as a force of social
critique. As we learn by the end of the play, Lorenzo/Atlanta manipulates the
people of Sicily into believing that Leonida was executed and that Lisandro died
from his self-inflicted wounds when really Lorenzo/Atlanta saved them both.
Lorenzo/Atlanta then re-introduces them into the Sicilian court through his
pastoral masque once Atticus and the people of Sicily realize the full extent of
their mistake. Lorenzo/Atlanta receives an amorous letter from his former
opponent, Swetnam/Misogynos, after the latter had stridently argued that women,
not men, are chiefly to blame in matters of love. Lorenzo/Atlanta, with the help of
the queen, organizes an elaborate trap to expose Swetnam’s masculine bravado as
mere talk and reveal his hypocrisy. In this scene and the female trial that follows
it, Swetnam becomes the central target of an anti-misogynistic reprisal which
makes him the receptacle for a female anger that should perhaps more rightly be
directed at Atticus (who set the unfair terms of the trial in the first place). The
women bind and prick Swetnam with pins, but unlike in the source they stop
68
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
before tearing him to pieces. Their punishment makes Swetnam into an example
for future misogynists, but it also has a corrective effect: in the final lines of the
epilogue, as the women lead in the muzzled Swetnam (referencing Speght’s A
Mouzell for Melastomus), Leonida forgives him to affirm that “Women are
neither tynnanous, nor cruell, / Though you report vs so” and Swetnam replies “I
now repent” (11-13). Swetnam has been rehabilitated, and Leonida’s forgiveness
works to build harmony between the sexes where in the novelette the women’s
final act is one of brutal revenge that ensures perpetual war. This harmony is
clearly a restoration of a patriarchal status quo, as Swetnam promises to defend
women with his sword (20-1) even though he now knows firsthand exactly how
capable women are of defending themselves when they must.
As I have hinted, however, Swetnam’s misogynistic rhetoric only fuelled
Sicily’s underlying problems with female sexuality. Atticus’s decision to exert an
uncompromising control over Leonida’s marriage was, in theory, a sound
marriage strategy. Its results, however, prove disastrous, as by the final act of the
play Atticus has no heirs left to pass Sicily on to except for his wicked counsellor
Nicanor. To restore patriarchal hierarchy the play does more than simply restore
Lorenzo as the male heir (although that is the final solution the audience is set up
to expect as soon as Lorenzo reveals himself to be alive in act 1). Instead, before
Lorenzo discards his female disguise, he provides a way for Atticus to redeem
himself and prove that he has changed. To create this opportunity Lorenzo/Atlanta
69
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
hijacks a masque he has been collaborating on with Atticus’s evil councillor,
Nicanor. This first masque provides Atticus with a way to repent publicly for his
tyranny and then to restore the lovers he believes he has sent to death. The
masque is designed to help Atticus see his flaws – ignorance, false suspicion,
detraction, and cruelty – personified so that Atticus will come to the realization
that “I am the King did sacred Iustice wrong…. It was my crueltie, not her
[Leonida’s] desert, that sacrific’d my Child to pallid Death” (5.3.79-82). From the
first act the audience witnesses Nicanor’s conviction that he should be king of
Sicily, and by the final act of the play it seems likely that Nicanor is hoping that
his masque will hasten Atticus’s death by amplifying the king’s grief. Since
Nicanor has become the king’s likely heir, Nicanor stands to gain the kingdom
should the masque destroy Atticus’s will to live. Yet when the figure of
Repentance intercedes towards the end, she offers Atticus a way to cope with
what he has done that departs from Nicanor’s plans. When Repentance takes the
stage and Atticus states “I do repent me, let this Sacrifice / Make satisfaction for
those fore-past Crimes / My ignorant soule committed,” Nicanor seems
unprepared for her to answer “’Tis accepted” and he exclaims “I am trapt. / Oh,
the great Devill! Whose device was this?” (5.3. 107-14). Since Lorenzo/Atlanta
was set to collaborate with Nicanor in the authorship of the masque (5.1.122-4),
the audience can guess that Lorenzo has set this trap to expose Nicanor and help
Atticus face up to his personal flaws. Lorenzo’s masque draws a powerful
70
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
emotional response from Atticus, who desperately says he will follow, call, and
sue to Repentance on his knees for her forgiveness (5.3.100-3). Like the
dumbshow, Lorenzo’s stagecraft achieves its social effects by triggering an
affective response in its spectators.
Once Atticus has repented, and had his repentance accepted, the next scene
of the masque confronts Atticus with the same problem of antisocial sexuality he
faced in act 3 so that this time, as judge, king, and audience, he can make the
correct choice. The scene is pastoral, in an echo of the natural imagery of the
dumbshow’s song. Lorenzo appears disguised as Atlanta disguised as an old
Shepherd, Lisandro (saved from death by Lorenzo/Atlanta’s healing balm)
appears as “Palemon,” and Leonida (whose execution was faked) appears
disguised as “Claribell,” a “Siluan Nymph.” Lorenzo, as the Shepherd, tells the
story of Palemon and Claribell, a tale which closely resembles Lisandro and
Leonida’s story in act 2 down to the detail of the old decrepit man (an allusion to
Nicanor) who pursues Claribell/Leonida to her ruin. Atticus asks the
Shepherd/Lorenzo how he can help, and the Shepherd/Lorenzo begs the king to
marry the two lovers. The king agrees and marries the characters before he
realizes that he is actually marrying his daughter to the suitor he himself earlier
rejected as inappropriate. The masque’s particular solution to the problem of
female erotic agency is not entirely encouraging: Atticus is not criticized for
having imprisoned his daughter and having attempted to execute her for violating
71
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
her confinement; he is criticized for not realizing that Lisandro was the better
choice than Nicanor. The lesson is that fathers should be more vigilant but no less
controlling. As a tragedy, the play might have powerful things to say to its
audience about the double standards which govern male and female sexuality. We
might want to learn from this play that female sexuality is not so dangerous after
all and that Leonida’s trial was symptomatic of an underlying dysfunction in the
Sicilian state. But as a tragicomedic ending, the play’s resolution teaches us
instead that female sexuality needs to be controlled by marriage as soon as
possible and that fathers should adopt flexible marriage strategies (and hope to
avoid catastrophic circumstances like the loss of two male heirs in quick
succession).
Nicanor’s masque, as a secretly-sinister gift for Atticus, emphasizes the
close homosocial bond between kings and councillors, as Atticus calls Nicanor his
“dearest Comforter” and invites him to “sit by vs to see what “new deuice”
Nicanor’s “loue / Hath studied to delight [his] Soueraigne” (5.3.50, 30, 33-4).
Having failed to woo Leonida, Nicanor concentrates his efforts on becoming as
close to Atticus as possible so that once Atticus dies he will stand to inherit the
kingdom, reconfiguring inheritance as a function of strong ties between men and
excluding women altogether. Lorenzo’s inserted scene emphasizes instead the
importance of exercising and conferring patriarchal power through the exchange
of women, while simultaneously restoring Atticus to the role of appropriate
72
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
exchanger once he has proved capable of making the correct choice. While
Atticus abused this role in the first act of the play by refusing Leonida’s choice of
a prince and placing her under his councillor Nicanor’s control, changes to the
masque give Lorenzo the opportunity to secure Atticus’s role for himself through
a dynastic lineage secured by women. After successfully restoring a heterosexual
status quo in which marriage contains the potentially destructive powers of female
erotic agency, Lorenzo finally discards his Amazon disguise and takes his place as
prime beneficiary of Sicily’s patriarchal order. What is remarkable about this play
is not the way its comedic ending seeks to contain sexuality and reinforce gender
norms – this is what comedic endings generically seek to do. What is remarkable
is the role drag, as a theatrical deception, plays in bringing about this ending.
If we return to the notion of the Skimmington as a tradition of MTF drag
whose function is to legitimize domestic violence so long as it comes from a
husband and not a wife,40 and to discipline female violence, then Lorenzo’s role in
leading the women of Sicily towards violent corporeal punishment for Swetnam
seems to contradict the spirit of the Skimmington tradition entirely. Diane Purkiss
argues that authors and printers might have published responses to Swetnam
under female pseudonyms as a means of invoking the “theatrical figure of the
unruly woman” akin to the “Woman on Top” Natalie Zemon Davis investigates in
her examination of festive MTF cross-dressing. This unruly woman, in Purkiss’s
analysis, “signified and to some extent legitimated social and political
73
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
criticism.”41 Since the pseudonymous names are puns on Swetnam’s name and
pamphlet in ways that play directly into the citational rhetoric Purkiss associates
with misogynistic entertainments like Swetnam’s pamphlet and Swetnam the
Woman-Hater, “the names under which the pamphlets appear mean that though
they purport to be by women, the reader is invited to see this as a penetrable
screen/identity, a theatrical performance of femininity which indicates a joke at
women’s expense.”42 Reading these pseudonyms as “penetrable screens” which
indicate “a joke at women’s expense” makes Sowernam and Munda’s
pseudonymous authorship resemble a drag performance which draws attention to
its own artificiality through parody. Lorenzo’s Amazon disguise in this context
may have appeared to a Jacobean audience as another drag performance in
response to Swetnam. While Purkiss suggests that the traditions of festive drag
lead seventeenth-century men to take women’s political action less seriously, I
think we can conclude from Swetnam the Woman-Hater that MTF drag on the
commercial early modern stage can do its own distinct work, work which is both
supportive of women’s sexuality to an extent and also supportive of a patriarchal
status quo. We could conclude that Lorenzo’s drag is a second-rate imitation of
female protest that devalues women’s political agency. We might also conclude,
however, that as drag, Lorenzo’s efforts construct a temporary space outside of
the binarized, patriarchal system of power, a space in which Lorenzo can selfreflexively criticize the system which affords him the privilege to speak without
74
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
losing that privilege. Female impersonation’s potential for reform may not
ultimately benefit women, but it is useful in understanding how patriarchies might
be subject to change from within – change initiated by the subjects it privileges
instead of those whose needs and power it disavows.
Conclusion
In Epicoene and Swetnam the Woman-Hater, MTF drag exposes the
counterproductive effects of overt misogyny, revealing it to be more unruly than
women’s sexuality itself. In both plays, obvious misogyny threatens social
stability when patriarchs like Morose and Atticus cannot fully come to terms with
the idea that female sexuality and female agency are not just a challenge to the
patriarchal status quo that affords them privilege, but a fundamental and necessary
part of it. If Morose had been able to reconcile himself to a wife who was not
silent, he could have fathered his own heirs long ago and not fallen victim to
Dauphine’s plot. If Atticus had been able to adopt a more flexible marriage
strategy and accept Leonida’s choice of suitor, either before her confinement or
after the damage was done, he could have avoided Nicanor’s machinations and
the problems caused by Swetnam’s overt misogyny. Although both Epicoene and
Swetnam the Woman-Hater feature female rebellion and resistance (through the
Ladies Collegiate in Epicoene and the female court in Swetnam) the cross-dressed
male characters who put on and remove femininity are the ones able to restore the
75
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
disrupted patriarchal order. Epicoene’s passing and exposure serve to advance
Dauphine. Lorenzo’s drag serves to restore him to the succession.43 Epicoene’s
and Lorenzo’s styles of impersonation do differ – Epicoene’s wit and subterfuge
suit the witty satires characteristic of the Inns of Court audiences Epicoene’s
Whitefriars audience enjoyed, while Lorenzo’s bold rhetoric and exceptional
fencing skills create the sense of spectacle and fast-paced action the Red Bull
audiences were reputed to crave.44 Further, while Lorenzo assumes and discards a
single, specific female persona, Dauphine’s androgyny is far less discrete and
episodic. He does not assume a female disguise himself as Lorenzo does, but this
means he cannot shed the effeminate suggestion of his name in the same way
Lorenzo can shed his effeminizing experience as a Turkish captive by shedding
his Amazon disguise.45 Despite the differences in the individual female personas,
however, both plays mobilize female impersonation to achieve similar ends in
critiquing flaws in patriarchal households.
Neither instance of MTF cross-dressing makes significant strides towards
changing the patriarchal status quo or ameliorating women’s positions within that
status quo. Epicoene humiliates the College of Ladies who court her as a member,
just as she humiliates the men who court her as a wife or mistress. Epicoene
shares her assertiveness as a wife with Mrs. Otter (although Mrs. Otter takes her
role as the dominant spouse to a more physically aggressive extreme) but overall
the comparison between the two serves to demonize Mrs. Otter, whose behaviour
76
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
seems unchangeable and unnatural rather than the product of clever artifice. The
plays reward the young men who have the wit to change their genders, much in
the same way that the MTF cross-dressing plots of romances reward men who
assume female disguises as a practical means to gain access to their beloveds.46
Unlike the romance plots, however, MTF cross-dressing in these two Jacobean
plays does not bring the males who cross-dress any closer to erotic fulfillment.
Dauphine presents Epicoene as an object of desire but we get no glimpse into
Epicoene as a desiring subject – partially because every word he speaks he speaks
in his guise as a silent woman and we can connect nothing back to his male
character but the few details Dauphine provides. We know a great deal more
about Lorenzo’s motivations from his asides and his conversations with his
trusted councillor Iago, but Lorenzo is remarkably silent on matters of sexual
desire. He turns Swetnam’s desire for Atlanta, his female persona, to his
advantage to catch Swetnam and put him on trial, but he shows no signs of
desiring anyone himself. He is an agent for female erotic agency, but his actions
are all in defence of the love between his sister Leonida and her suitor Lisandro.
In a way this makes him the ideal heir in Bourdieu’s analysis of marriage strategy,
as he puts the preservation of the kingdom and his family’s patrimony above all
other personal concerns. By resuming his role as male heir he makes room within
the family’s marriage strategy for erotic desire but contains it in a marriage of
secondary importance (as Lorenzo’s marriage when and if it takes place will not
77
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
jeopardize Sicily’s control over its assets the way a marriage between a female
heir and an outside male would). While Lorenzo arranges for women to punish
Swetnam in an all-female trial that operates outside of the Sicilian judicial system,
the bulk of Lorenzo’s efforts goes towards reforming the monarchy he will inherit
one day – he stabilizes Sicily with his return to his masculine identity and his
recuperation of his sister’s destructive/dangerous sexuality but the play makes no
move to address Lorenzo’s own sexuality or how his disguise might impact the
role he will assume one day as a husband and father. Although Lorenzo secures a
place for sexual desire in Sicily, sexual desire remains tied to the social disorder
Lorenzo adopted his disguise to correct. So long as Lorenzo, the patriarch-to-be,
remains clear of it, sexual desire’s threatening ability to make men lose their selfcontrol (the core issue in debate during the trial scene) can continue to exist
within a patriarchal hierarchy that requires males to retain control at all times.
Lorenzo’s distance from the sexual complications that plague the other
characters parallels Dauphine’s. Both Lorenzo and Dauphine are motivated by the
same desire to see themselves restored to their status as rightful heirs. Lorenzo’s
desire is more legitimate than Dauphine’s, as he is Atticus’s son and heir to a
kingdom while Dauphine is only Morose’s nephew and heir to money and a
townhouse, but Lorenzo’s Turkish captivity (which Atticus considers a fate worse
than death for his son) presumably complicates Lorenzo’s ability to resume his
position as heir to the Sicilian throne. MTF drag in these two plays does not
78
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
develop the gendered or sexual complexities of the characters who assume female
disguises; instead drag triggers and exposes the flaws in a patriarchal system
where patriarchs like Morose and Atticus can overindulge and overreach the
limits of their powers over others without facing any kind of effective check. The
check on their power in both plays, we see, does not come directly from their
wives, their councillors, their subjects, or their neighbours but from their male
heirs, who have a vested interest in ensuring that the household they stand to
inherit does not collapse and that its members do not revolt before they have a
chance to take over. By channelling the condemnations of Morose and Atticus
through the drag personae of Epicoene and Atlanta, Dauphine and Lorenzo are
able to critique their elders for their patriarchal abuses without in effect
challenging the patriarchal systems which they stand to benefit from later in life.
Notes
1
For an analysis of male-to-female disguise plots in romances, see Winfried
Schleiner’s “Male Cross-Dressing and Transvestism in Renaissance Romances,”.
2
Natasha Korda has recently challenged the extent to which we might consider
the early modern stage to be “all-male”. While actors on the commercial stage
were male, commercial theatres relied on female labour, female creativity, and
female investment. See Korda,“The Case of Moll Frith: Women’s Work and the
‘All-Male Stage,’” and Korda, Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early
Modern English Stage.
79
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
3
For more information on female performance traditions, including accounts of
professional female performers in the 1530s, see Stephen Orgel's, Impersonations:
The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England, pgs 4-8 and 11.
4
Orgel, for instance, discusses pervasive cultural analogies between boys and
women which derive from the Galenic model of sex-differentiation (see pgs 1827). Orgel also notes that in the unofficial guild structure of early modern
commercial theatre, where boys served as apprentices to actors who belonged to
guilds, there was an “economic analogy between boys and women” as dependants
which “overlaid a more essential [analogy]: boys were, like women – but unlike
men – acknowledged objects of sexual attraction for men” (70).
5
Drouin, “Cross-Dressing, Drag, and Passing: Slippages in Shakespearean
Comedy,” 25.
6
Orgel, 49.
7
Ibid, 49.
8
The term “boy” in early modern culture extended beyond puberty to what we
would now consider young adulthood (ages 8-24, approximately).
9
Ostovich, “Introduction to Epicoene, or The Silent Woman,” in Jonson: Four
Comedies, 233.
10
Jonson, Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, in Jonson: Four Comedies, 1.1.22. All
further references to the play will appear in parentheses in the text and will be to
this edition.
11
Truewit comments that “Many things that seem foul, i’ the doing, do please,
done” and relegates women’s self-beautification to this foul, private, but
ultimately pleasing realm. He opines that “A lady should indeed study her face
when we think she sleeps; nor when the doors are shut should men be inquiring…
Is it for us to see their perukes put on, their false teeth, their complexion, their
eyebrows, their nails? You see gilders not work but enclosed. They must not
discover how little serves with the help of art to adorn a great deal” (1.1.97-104).
12
Snook, Women, Beauty and Power in Early Modern England: A Feminist
Literary History, 7. Part One of Snook’s book focuses specifically on rethinking
“the common characterization of cosmetic practices in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury England as dangerously unhealthy and women themselves as dupes
destroying their health to decorate their faces with cosmetic products,” exploring
early modern political constructions of beauty in texts by Brilliana Harley, Mary
Wroth, and other female authors (9).
13
Snook, 7.
14
The college itself, as a fictional institution where women live together apart
from their husbands and do as they please, functions in many ways like an
Amazonian community would in the early modern imagination.
80
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
15
Stage directions indicate that Truewit “kisses the bride” in congratulations to
Epicoene on her marriage. Epicoene “kisses him” in the stage directions and
comments “I return you the thanks, Master Truewit, so friendly a wish deserves.”
The friendliness of the kiss seems a pretense for stirring Morose’s jealousy as he
immediately exclaims “She has acquaintance too!” (3.5.3-7)). Daw kisses the
bride in the next scene, and the stage direction indicates that Epicoene “kisses
them severally [Daw, Haughty, Centaur, Mavis, and Trusty] as he [Daw] presents
them” (3.6.5-10).
16
Ostovich, “General Introduction,” 27.
17
Drouin, 29.
18
As critics often observe, Morose’s intolerance seems to extend to every kind of
noise except the sound of his own voice.
19
Male-to-female cross-dressing appears in several other early modern plays,
including James Shirley’s A Bird in a Cage, Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World
My Masters, William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, and others.
These instances of MTF cross-dressing have not received significant attention as a
trope, but are somewhat distinct from the pattern of MTF cross-dressing in
Epicoene and Swetnam the Woman-Hater in that the instances are fairly isolated
and episodic aspects of a larger plot, in which the characters spend most of their
time on stage as males and assume female disguises diegetically for brief periods
of time with the audience’s explicit knowledge that they are male characters in
female disguise.
20
See Barbara Matulka’s The Novels of Juan De Flores and Their European
Diffusion: A Study in Comparative Literature, esp. chapter four, “The Influence of
the Grisel y Mirabella.”
21
Jones, “From Polemical Prose to the Red Bull: The Swetnam Controversy in
Women-Voiced Pamphlets and the Public Theater,” 127.
22
Ibid, 133.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid, 134.
25
De Flores, Histoire De Aurelio Et Isabelle, Fille Du Roy d’Escose,
Nouuellement Traduict En Quatre Langues, Italien, Espaignol, Francois, &
Anglois, A2r.
26
Swetnam the Woman-Hater: The Controversy and the Play,1.1.159-61. All
further quotations from the play will be taken from Coryl Crandall’s edition and
references will be given in the text.
27
Bourdieu, “Marriage Strategies as Strategies of Social Reproduction,” 127-8.
28
Ibid, 130.
29
Ibid, 129.
30
Ibid, 140.
81
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
31
Ibid.
Although it was not impossible in England for a princess to inherit the throne,
marry, and retain her authority as ruling sovereign (as Mary I did), Atticus notes
that Sicily’s laws specifically prevent women from inheriting the throne but that
Leonida’s husband would be able to claim it for himself.
33
In the novelette, the couple consummate their “burning desires” as well before
they are betrayed. The novel describes “many dayes that secretlye ynoughe of
their loue with great pleasure they hadde inioyed.” De Flores, B4r.
34
Lorenzo’s reasons for disguising himself are in this respect not unlike the
Duke’s reasons in Measure for Measure, and Lorenzo likewise discovers that
sexuality and tyranny are at the root of his state’s problems.
35
Thauvette, “Masculinity and Turkish Captivity in in Swetnam the WomanHater.”
36
Wayne, “The Dearth of the Author: Anonymity’s Allies and Swetnam the
Woman-Hater,” 227.
37
Harvey, 40.
38
Phillippy, “The Mat(t)er of Death: The Defense of Eve and the Female Ars
Moriendi,” 150.
39
Ibid, 151.
40
See pages 10-11 of the introduction.
41
Purkiss, “Material Girls,” 84.
42
Ibid.
43
Lorenzo’s Amazonian disguise serves to reform Sicily but it also reforms
Lorenzo. Atticus in act 1 says he prefers to think that Lorenzo is dead rather than
hope he has been taken captive at the battle of Lepanto. Turkish captivity, to
Atticus, is a worse than death. Lorenzo’s shame may explain in part why Lorenzo
assumes the female disguise himself while Dauphine hires a boy to assume a
female disguise. Although Dauphine Eugenie bears a feminine name and has
earned his uncle’s disapproval, he has not been effeminized to the point Lorenzo
has as a returned Turkish captive.
44
Distinctions between indoor playhouses like Whitefriars and outdoor
playhouses like the Red Bull spring from the class distinctions between the
affluent, educated clientele who could afford the higher admissions to indoor
playhouses and the humbler, more raucous clientele of the outdoor playhouses.
The Red Bull playhouse in particular earned a reputation in the seventeenthcentury as a playhouse that catered to a boisterous and unrefined crowd. As Mark
Bayer notes, “theatre historians and literary critics from the seventeenth-century
to the present” have tended “to condescend toward the Red Bull and its audience,
which apparently delighted in little more than ‘loud clamors’ and ‘daily tumults’”
(149). As Bayer argues, Red Bull plays served a key function in the plague32
82
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
ravaged Clerkenwell community by “[p]lacing the audiences in the middle of the
action, engulfed and astounded,” offering “its less privileged patrons a total (albeit
temporary) escape from difficult lives” (176).
45
“Dauphine” means Princess and his surname, Eugenie, has a feminine ending
incongruous with Dauphine’s sex.
46
See Schleiner’s “Male Cross-Dressing and Transvestism in Renaissance
Romances.”
83
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Chapter Two: Masculinity, Sexuality, and the Polyvocal
Parliament of the English Civil Wars
In tracing the evolution of masculinity in her 2008 book Masculinity and
Emotion in Early Modern English Literature, Jennifer Vaught concisely
synthesizes the critically accepted long view of pre-modern masculinity studies,
which holds that the “pronounced cultural shift in the English aristocracy from a
class of violent warriors to more civilized courtiers or gentlemen with
comparatively little military experience gradually transformed literary standards
of manhood in the Renaissance.”1 Citing the work of Alexandra Shepard and
Lawrence Stone, Vaught observes that “[p]erceptions of the softening aristocratic
versions of manhood resulted in part from the change in profession for manyupper class Englishmen from the militaristic to the civilian arts” over the course
of the sixteenth century.2 “A bloody or scarred body,” she posits, was by
Shakespeare’s time “no longer the predominant sign of a man in a variety of
genres.”3 While this narrative speaks particularly well to the transformation of the
male elite in the late sixteenth-century, it cannot account for the specific ways
masculinity was (re)constructed in moments of acute social and political crisis
like the English Civil Wars of the 1640s. If by the turn of the seventeenth century,
as Vaught asserts, civilian arts had replaced military conquest as the chief arena in
which to assert one’s masculinity, then what were the English people to make of
85
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
the bungled negotiations and resulting bloody conflicts that marked the 1640s?
How did ideals of patriarchal masculinity shift and bend to compensate for the
many attempts at a radical reconfiguration of the English political system?
As Diane Purkiss reminds us, “there is no one masculinity” specific to the
English Civil Wars, “though any pocket of masculinity – a regiment, a republican
group, a Cavalier drinking-party – will try to pretend that its ideology of
masculinity is the only possible one.”4 Building on Purkiss’s work, this chapter
explores the multiple and competing iterations of masculinity constructed and
critiqued in the satirical political discourses of the 1640s. I approach masculinity
in this chapter by looking at the places where it is conspicuously absent or
invisible – in porno-political pamphlets which assume female authorship, feature
female characters in overwhelming majority, and explicitly use sexuality as a
framework to engage with the political culture of parliament-controlled London in
the 1640s. I borrow the term ‘porno-political’ from Susan Wiseman, who asserts
the importance of reading sexual satire from the 1640s and 50s as engaged with
contemporary political debates about republicanism and monarchism.5 Looking at
mock female petitions, the Mistris Parliament series of pamphlets, and the 1647 A
Parliament of Ladies, I will argue that the sexualized female persona enables a
fantasy of a single, unified patriarchal voice – a voice this persona appears to
usurp but which never actually existed in the first place.
86
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
By funnelling the polyvocality and sectarianism of 1640s politics into
sexualized female personae, the pamphlets I examine attempt to preserve and
idealize a kind of civilian masculinity – defined by peace, measured speech,
agreement, and decisiveness – that was no longer available after the breakdown of
political hierarchy between the king and the king’s subjects. Polyvocality
threatened patriarchal hierarchy by making visible the conflicts within the
political system over how power should be divided between members of the
patriarchal elite. As I discussed briefly in the introduction, James I promoted an
analogy between the family and the state, encouraging his subjects to respect,
love, and obey him as they would a father. Political power in this idealized model
flowed in a continuous and linear chain from God, the ultimate father, to the king,
to his male nobles, and so on, down to male heads of households who ruled over
their dependants. The long parliament challenged this ideal by removing the king
from his position in the chain of power – first symbolically in 1643 by creating its
own seal of authority to rival the king’s and then literally in 1649 by beheading
Charles I and blocking the succession of his heirs. Parliament unofficially
assumed the king’s position as the ruling ‘body’ of England when Charles initially
left London for Oxford in 1642, but it was ill-suited to sustain the univocal ideal
of royal authority it had inherited. Parliament’s many bodies proved problematic
to a political culture invested in the idea that political power flowed from the
single, divinely-appointed body of the monarch.6
87
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
This chapter argues that porno-political discourse of the 1640s buttresses
the masculine prerogative to power while simultaneously critiquing powerful men
like the king and the MPs for their failures as rulers. It accomplishes this by
preserving the offices and institutions of patriarchal authority, like the monarchy,
parliament, and the male head of household, but depicting the males who occupy
them as disorderly, sex-crazed women unworthy of the masculine offices they
hold. Rather than portray the political status quo as the problem, in other words,
pamphleteers portrayed the long parliament specifically as a perversion of
parliamentary prerogative made un-masculine by its noise, its unruliness, and its
inability to self-govern. Since the parodic sexualized female voice, unlike the
fragmented parliamentary voice, was already an established image for threats to
patriarchal hierarchy, porno-political discourse using the persona of the lustful
woman translated the new threat into the terms of an old, known threat. The
female personae of satirical Civil War pamphlets were drag performances
composed of exaggerated stereotypes about female sexuality, and in many cases
parodied existing female-authored texts in ways that highlighted their speakers’
insincerity. Yet despite the shocking and disingenuous tone most of these
pamphlets adopted, their humour delivered a legitimate critique of London’s
political dysfunction in the 1640s. Because the pamphlets do not easily pass as
female-authored texts, they prompt their readers to continually question whether
the arguments the personae make are facetious or serious. Like festive drag
88
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
performances, which make gender transgression a socially acceptable form of
entertainment, the female persona’s failure to pass as female assures readers that
faux female-authored pamphlets are socially-acceptable entertainments. The
notion that anything the female personae say in these pamphlets could be a joke, I
argue, enables authors and readers to broach major flaws in England’s political
hierarchies without challenging the patriarchal assumptions of these systems in an
outright and alienating manner. As I will demonstrate in this chapter, likening
parliament to a lustful woman enabled writers and readers to vent frustrations and
criticize parliament while continuing to idealize patriarchal hierarchy and the
peaceful, familial bonds between subjects and king that parliament signified in
ideal circumstances.
In the sections that follow, I examine two kinds of porno-political
discourse, each of which uses lustful female personae to create a particular fantasy
of patriarchal univocality that criticizes the current members of parliament while
honouring the institution of parliament itself. Following the chronology of the
First and Second Civil War conflicts, I divide my discussion into two sections.7
The first section explores the mock petition phenomenon popular during the First
Civil War (1642-7) which respond in part to women’s increasing involvement in
petitioning parliament. The second section focuses on texts published during the
shorter Second Civil War (1648-9), which resulted in parliament’s unprecedented
resolution to execute Charles I on charges of treason and analyzes the derisive
89
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
portrayals of parliament as a lustful female body that gives birth to monsters.
After briefly outlining the ways gender and sexuality inform my analysis of
Caroline politics in the first section of this chapter, I first explore the mock
petition phenomenon of 1642-7, in which authors adopt the univocal female voice
of female-authored petitions but demand sex rather than religious or political
reform. I explore how and why these mock petitions give pornographic accounts
of an imaginary libertine past to comment on London’s difficult present and
impossible future under parliamentary rule. Second, I examine feminizations of
parliament in the Mistris Parliament series of 1648 and Henry Neville’s oftreprinted A Parliament of Ladies, both popular during the Second Civil War. In
Mistris Parliament, a pseudo-morality play broken up into multiple pamphlets, a
female character named parliament confesses her sins and begs forgiveness as she
labours to birth the monster of “Ordinance.” The series represents parliament as a
single female body in order to protect parliament as an abstract ideal perverted by
the individual male members who have impregnated “her.” A Parliament of
Ladies depicts a self-appointed parliament of women which sets out to invert the
hierarchy of the household (and the state by extension) by making husbands
subject to the pleasure of their wives. In so far as the female parliament’s failures
mirror the failures of the long parliament of England – both bodies become
factionalized, noisy, and ineffectual once they dispatch their common enemy – the
parliament of ladies illustrates that polyvocal parliamentary procedure is itself an
90
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
exercise best suited for women and incapable of providing an alternative to
traditional monarchical rule. So, while critics like James Grantham Turner read
1640s porno-political discourse as a means of discrediting women’s burgeoning
political activism and/or as royalist propaganda aimed at discrediting republican
activism, I contend that porno-political print offers us the opportunity to explore
how the Civil Wars occasioned a referendum on masculinity and its institutions of
power.8
Gender, Sexuality, and Polyvocality in Jacobean and Caroline Politics
In Epicoene and Swetnam the Woman-Hater, female impersonation served
to highlight the flaws at the very top of the patriarchal system – in Atticus the
king and father of Swetnam, and on a smaller scale, in Morose, the head of the
household and fortune-holder in Epicoene. While conflicts between elders and
their heirs are a staple of comedy, the plots of Epicoene and Swetnam take on a
particular political resonance when compared to each other in the context of the
Jacobean court and Jacobean ideologies of political hierarchy like the family-state
analogy which puts the king in the position of the father to his subjects. While
neither play explicitly critiques James I, the critiques of Atticus’s and Morose’s
misogyny, which leads to their abuse of their position as heads of their
households, alludes to a subtle political critique of James I as a king/father. For
91
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
example, in analyzing the woodcut featured on Swetnam the Woman-Hater’s 1620
title page, which features an indoor female court that doesn’t match the outdoor
female court enacted in the play, Valerie Wayne argues that the image connects
the trial of Swetnam the misogynist to a “confrontation between the misogynist
James I and a revived Elizabeth I, who is surrounded by female supporters for the
purpose of arraigning the king’s retrograde attitudes towards women.”9 As Wayne
points out, the presence of women in broad brimmed hats in the illustration defies
the king’s 1620s demand that women be shamed for wearing masculine fashions,
referencing James’s reputation as misogynist. “The provision of Swetnam’s name
beside the male figure would protect it from any charge that it was an outright
image of the king,” Wayne writes, “But those who perceived the parallels
between Swetnam and James,” and perhaps between Atticus and James, “could
find the title page and the play especially relevant to the current controversy over
how women were permitted to appear and behave.”10 While Atticus and Morose
face resistance from their subjects and subordinates and are compelled to change,
however, James limited his interactions with his parliament and attempted to
cement his authority as England’s divinely appointed (and thus irreproachable)
sovereign.
Wayne and Simon Shepherd trace several parallels between the Sicilian
royal family in Swetnam the Woman-Hater and James I’s own family, noting that
both have two sons and a daughter, and that as Shepherd has pointed out there is a
92
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
potential parallel between the death of Atticus’s eldest son, announced at the
beginning of the play, and the death of James I’s eldest son Henry in 1612.11
Shepherd sees in Lorenzo’s Amazonian disguise a nod to Elizabethan imagery
and the hope of a restored “Henry surrogate” who “dresses as an Elizabethan-type
Amazon to fulfil his political role. On Lorenzo are focused the sort of hopes that
were associated with Henry, the restoration of justice and the blessing of true
love.”12 Given that the play was performed and printed while Charles I was the
heir apparent we might also see in Lorenzo the hope that a second-born son like
Charles I could rouse himself from the weakness and effeminacy implied by
Lorenzo’s Turkish captivity and echoed perhaps in Charles’s childhood rickets,
restore himself to his full masculine privilege by performing deft acts of
swordsmanship and statecraft, and bring justice and stability to a grieving
kingdom. While the patriarchal reform and hope of restoration Lorenzo achieves
does not quite materialize in England itself, discourses of masculinity and
sexuality traced in the previous chapter carry forward into Caroline England as
important tools through which to critique Charles I and the 1640s Caroline
political regime, as the MTF drag performances of the commercial stage give way
to scurrilous political satires dominated by parodic female personae.
Charles I inherited James I’s political culture of divine-right rule, which he
exploited during his own reign, but in the years before the Wars he had largely
withdrawn himself from “the public practice of kingship,” weakening the
93
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
connection between himself and his subjects by limiting their right to petition him
personally and by retreating from requests that he exercise “his power to heal,
notably by touching for scrofula, known as ‘the King’s evil’.”13 In the eleven
years of what historians term the “personal rule” between the parliament of 1628
and the short parliament of 1640, Charles I preferred to rule by royal prerogative,
exerting his constitutional powers to raise money without having to consult
parliament (taxes required parliamentary consent).14 As Michael Braddick and
others remark, there was nothing unconstitutional about Charles I’s personal rule
and it did facilitate a decade of peace and relative political stability in England.
Rising costs of the Bishops’ Wars in Scotland eventually required Charles I to call
parliament in 1640, triggering the series of events which would result in the First
Civil War, but the years of the personal rule provided a baseline for future visions
of a univocal patriarchal authority centralized within the body of a single ruler. To
critique parliament in parliament-controlled 1640s London was not necessarily to
endorse the king, but the specific critiques levelled at parliament, including
accusations of war-lust, inchoate speech, dividedness, and indecisiveness, held
parliament to the standards of rule Charles I had set as an absolutist monarch,
against which parliament was found severely deficient.
As Purkiss, Turner, and others observe, Civil War propaganda used highly
gendered and sexualized terms. The pamphlets which use a female voice as their
platform for political commentary, and which are the focus of this chapter, do so
94
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
in large part to critique parliament, although anti-royalist propaganda appeared
too in newsbooks and popular pamphlets. The ubiquitous nature of the familystate analogy, wherein the king was a figurative father to his subjects and a
husband to the parliament, makes sexuality an indispensable cultural register
through which to re-theorize fractured political relationships. Since patriarchal
norms of male sexual continence make female inconstancy and insatiability the
predominant signs of antisocial sexual desire, the sexualized female persona can
also express what its royalist authors perceive as an antisocial desire for political
anarchy through metaphors of sexual promiscuity. As Ng notes, “the republican
challenge to absolutism was at its heart also a challenge to the rule of the father,
and so a challenge, even if a partial one, to patriarchy.”15 Some authors chose to
counter this republican challenge by defending absolutism, but others countered it
by parodying and filtering a republican worldview through a sexualized female
persona, offering their readers a fantasy of patriarchal family hierarchy overturned
by female unruliness so that they might reject it and support patriarchal political
hierarchy reinstated. Thus, the female persona in porno-political satire came to
represent the polyvocal, disorderly, factious parliament, making the court (largely
absent in these satires) seem orderly, productive, and masculine by comparison.
Feminizing and sexualizing the polyvocal parliament as a loud, obnoxious whore
became, in porno-political royalist propaganda, a means of declaring parliament
unfit to govern England.
95
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Under a single king the polyvocality of parliament worked to the
kingdom’s advantage (theoretically) by representing the different voices of the
king’s most valued subjects.16 Although much collaborative work and negotiation
went into royal proclamations, their format deliberately obscures this work so as
to emphasize the king’s voice as the authority which gives the proclamation
weight. Kings were to collaborate with parliament where feasible, and Charles I
had been “personally involved in both the elections and legislative process” of
James I’s 1621 and 1624 parliaments in preparation for his future role, but he
became increasingly contemptuous of parliament once he took the throne.17
Parliament likewise became increasingly suspicious of Charles once he became
king.18 As parliament moved to place limits on the king’s power (most notably by
forwarding the Petition of Right (1628) demanding that the king heed the rights of
parliament set out in the Magna Carta), relations between parliament and the king
rapidly deteriorated. The members of the long parliament were initially united in
bringing their grievances to the king and in urging the king to dismiss his
councillors and rely instead on the voices of parliament for guidance. When
neither the king nor parliament backed down from their demands, disagreement
within parliament on how to proceed amplified existing religious and economic
rifts among members (MPs) which would eventually give rise to full-fledged
factions. By the end of the First Civil War in 1647, parliament was so divided that
Charles I was able to work the noble-backed Presbyterian faction and the army96
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
backed Independent faction against each other to negotiate peace terms more
favourable to him.19 Even after the army-led purge of parliament in 1648 crippled
the Presbyterian faction, making way for the regicide, new rifts formed within the
remaining Independents. Unwilling to dissolve itself after more than a decade in
power, the long parliament of 1640 met its end in 1653 when Oliver Cromwell
called in soldiers to clear the house. At the next parliament the majority of the
MPs resigned and pledged their support to Cromwell, ushering in an autocratic
Protectorate which consolidated its power in the single, male figure of the
Protector.
Without painting over the complex differences between Charles I’s reign
and Cromwell’s rule, we can say that the Protectorate achieved stability in
England much the way Charles I’s personal rule did – by centralizing power
symbolically into a single, male voice. In practice Cromwell’s power as England’s
“Protector” was no more dominated by a single voice than the king’s power had
been: both men had advisors and worked in concert with councils to rule the
country. Cromwell rose from the House of Commons as a military general to
become a spokesman for the soldiers of the New Model Army in their struggles to
receive compensation from parliament and secure their religious freedom against
what they perceived as the popery of Anglican and Presbyterian worship. When
Cromwell commanded the parliament to disband in 1653 it was not his voice
alone but the soldiers backing it which ended the thirteen-year parliamentary
97
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
session. Charles’s and Cromwell’s power bases may have been different, but the
model of political hierarchy was in principle quite similar. Just as a king’s ability
to “speak” for his country relies on his ability to command and compel his noble
subjects, Cromwell’s ability to “speak” for England relied on his ability to
command and compel the New Model Army.
If political power had overshadowed military power as the dominant ideal
of patriarchal masculinity in the decades leading up to the Civil Wars, the
establishment of the Protectorate should have reinstated military might as the
superior masculine ideal. Yet in separating itself forcefully from the long
parliament by effectively removing its ministers from their offices, Cromwell’s
Army-backed Independent faction highlighted instead the ineffectiveness of
civilian government and undermined the masculine credibility of the only recently
ascendant civilian art of politics. Parliament’s success on the battlefield, the timehonoured testing ground of masculine virtue, seems ironically to have nullified
parliament’s claims to masculine superiority in the political arena in the long term
once the Army had fractured away from the governing body itself. Yet as Purkiss
has argued, Cromwell’s military prowess came to signify a type of masculine
excess which displayed “a curious tendency to tip over into problematic
femininity through tropes of loss of control.”20 Royalist depictions of Cromwell
relentlessly emphasize his bodily excesses, from his large nose to rumours of his
adultery and “[e]ven avidly or determinedly pro-Cromwell writers apparently
98
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
could not simply settle into celebrating Cromwell’s efficacy on the battlefield and
his military prowess, his abstemious lifestyle and religious devotion” for fear that
such arguments would invoke the royalist portrayals of Cromwell’s masculine
excess instead.21
If Oliver Cromwell’s military career failed to earn him recognition as the
genuine “patriarchal fantasy” Purkiss argues he might seem to be on the surface,
we might conclude then that the military ideal of masculinity did not prove
entirely viable in the 1640s. How then were masculine ideals of military action
and political negotiation reconciled among the body of the male elite who were
neither idealized as statesmen nor as warriors? Since much has already been
written about Cavalier masculinity, particularly in the context of the Restoration,22
I devote much of my attention in the rest of this chapter to the gendering of nonroyalist members of parliament which worked itself out in the popular London
press of the 1640s.
Before the sixteenth century, parliament drew on a male elite defined by
landownership and the concomitant military service it owed to the king. As
service at court came to replace service in battle and the aristocracy began to
liquidate their assets to support expensive lifestyles, the composition of the
English electorate and the English parliament shifted. To vote in the 1640s, a man
had to own property valued at more than forty shillings. For the newly-wealthy
merchant classes, land was widely available and inflation had increased property
99
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
values so that over the 1620s and 30s the “electorate extended increasingly
downward, including in most areas of the middle class.”23 A progressively more
diverse electorate led to a progressively more diverse House of Commons,
especially since in 1604 the House of Commons gained “the power to rule on the
legality of elections and to determine the right of membership in the House,” a
power which “crippled the court’s efforts to nominate its own candidates for
parliament and opened the field for opposition.”24 The House of Commons, where
most of the Roundhead leaders (though not all) held their seats, and which would
form the backbone of the “rump” parliament responsible for abolishing the House
of Lords and executing the king, had strong ties to the wealthy middle class and to
what Elizabeth Skerpan calls the “godly” segment of the middle class which
began to believe itself “called to public affairs” out of religious duty.25 Many
members of the House of Commons became military men, and many became
shrewd political negotiators, but before the Civil Wars compelled them to become
these things many of them might have defined themselves in masculine terms as
heads of households, not warriors or statesmen.
Tracing masculine ideals in the conduct literature of the Tudor-Stuart
period, Shepard writes that “the household was represented as the primary site of
male authority…. Heading a household was associated with the mastery not only
of a man’s self, but of his subordinates and his resources, and in this way it was
often equated with manhood itself.”26 Unlike military service or service at court,
100
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
heading a household was presented as a “portion of the patriarchal dividend to
which all adult males might aspire, and it was often approached as the
precondition of men’s political involvement with the wider community.”27 If
heading a household was indeed the masculine ideal most relevant to the MPs of
the long parliament, we might better understand parliament’s masculine
inadequacies (in the eyes of its critics) as its failure to centralize power along the
patriarchal hierarchy of the family-state analogy. For while each MP might fulfill
the conduct-literature ideal of the good head of household in his private life, there
exists no model for how householders of relatively equal power should coordinate
and share power in the absence of a single, higher patriarch. Although parliament
assumed the king’s role as head of state, parliament – as a fractious assembly of
householders vying for dominance – may have seemed like no head at all. MPs
stood as rulers of their own ‘little Commonwealths’ at home, but in parliament
they were (in theory) supposed to adopt a subordinate (hence, feminized) position
to the king while nevertheless managing affairs concerning the ordering of the
household-state. While parliament sought to make itself England’s new patriarch,
many seem to have regarded parliament’s ascendancy as akin to a wife trying to
overthrow her husband’s rule. That porno-political satire should make use of
authorial drag is less than surprising in this context, since the parodic female
personae of the genre function like Skimmington rituals to shame households in
which the husband is not the dominant ‘head’ and thereby reinforce normative
101
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
patriarchal hierarchy. That neighbours played such an active role in Skimmington
rituals (often serving as cross-dressed surrogates for offending husbands) suggests
that a disturbance in the marital dynamic of one household necessitates
community intervention to ensure the stability of patriarchal order throughout.
Likewise, the female persona in porno-political satire in the 1640s becomes a tool
through which the broader community could intervene to critique the
dysfunctional relationship between parliament and the king, focusing on the
problematic nature of the conflict itself rather than on the individual failings of
any one party.
Beyond the correspondence between Lady Skimmington and the
sexualized female personae of 1640s print, though, attacks against parliament
which use the analogy of the state as household to criticize parliament’s ability to
govern England reach out to broader questions about the perceived naturalness of
patriarchal hierarchy. Because, as Shepard writes, “[t]he self-government
expected of manhood was the basis of men’s claims to authority,” attacks on
parliament’s ability to govern found fertile ground in attacks on parliament’s
masculinity.28 Yet gender-based attacks posed a problem for antiparliamentarians, for to attack parliament’s ability to govern could open up
critique of the patriarchal assumption that elite male householders were best
suited to govern the state. Such critiques did arise from the system’s “subordinate
subjects” in the form of apprentice and women-led petitioning (involving large,
102
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
public demonstrations) against parliament.29 If neither the king nor the male elite
elected to parliament could prove themselves effective and capable of governing
the country, the cultural assumptions which worked to naturalize patriarchal
hierarchy should have lost substantial force. As the Restoration’s reestablishment
of patriarchal hierarchy makes clear, however, they did not. Katherine Gillespie
and Phyllis Mack see the roots of twentieth-century feminist activism in women’s
mid-seventeenth-century political writing,30 and the seventeenth century in
general saw women’s increased participation in print culture, but political
representation remained the privilege of the male elite.31 What preserved the
patriarchal hierarchy in the midst of so much criticism of its traditional
institutions? In the next two sections I will argue that satirical female personae in
mock petitions and female parliament pamphlets served to channel criticism
towards the flawed men in control of patriarchal institutions like the monarchy
and the parliament and to preserve the figure of the individual head of household
as an ideal of masculinity.
Mock Petitions and the First Civil War
In the early 1640s, several female-authored petitions found their way into
print as pamphlets and in newsbooks. Female petitioners themselves often drew
more attention than their petitions, however, as they assembled in the thousands to
103
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
deliver them to parliament. Petitioning, akin to demonstrating, required a
significant amount of coordination and effort, since “[a]part from the composition
and publication of the document itself,” organizers “had to gather signatures,
adopt and distribute the marching colours that identified their demonstrations as
ceremonial processions (white for peace, sea-green for levelling), and move
coherent masses of women by water and land.”32 “Obligatory references to female
weakness” in female petitions, Turner notes, “were further belied by the oral and
physical vigor of the demonstrations themselves, which besieged the Parliament
building, mounted the stairs, broke staffs of office, and confronted increasingly
violent efforts to control them.”33 As Mercurius Civicus reported in August of
1643, “about two or three thousand Women, most of them of the inferiour sort”
gathered “under the pretense of presenting a petition to both Houses of Parliament
for peace” but carried themselves so “uncivilly towards divers Members of the
House, and others, using many horrid execrations,” so that “at last from words
they fell to blowes, insomuch that upon their insolent abusing of divers men of
quality, the trained Band and the two Troops of Horse were forced to fall amongst
them for feare of further danger.”34 Newsbooks are hardly objective historical
sources,35 and phrases like “continuying their outrageous courses in casting stones
and brickbats, they [the petitioners] occasioned the more violence to be used
towards them, wherein divers of them were dangerously hurt” suggest that we
may never get an accurate picture of how or why exactly this petition became
104
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
violent. While female petitioners clashed aggressively with parliament, femaleauthored petitions received equally hostile treatment in print where anonymous
and pseudonymous satirists appropriated the format and characteristics of female
petitions as a source of pornographic humour. Turner aptly characterizes mock
pamphlets as responding “somewhat hysterically to serious Utopian discourses by
women”36 and Turner’s Libertines and Radicals argues persuasively that pornopolitical print is “a deliberate attempt to confront and neutralize women’s efforts
to establish their own institutions.”37 Looking first at female-authored petitions as
a genre, and then at three mock petitions of the early 1640s, I will demonstrate
that mock petitions present fantasies of sexual disorder as a means of investing
social and political order in the patriarchal structure of the family. The
pseudonymous lustful female petitioner preserves the male head of household as
the ultimate masculine ideal, even as “she” laments that there will be no men left
in London to fulfill this ideal should the (feminized) chaos of war continue.
Women’s Petitioning and its Responses
Critics typically assume that mock petitions are male-authored and that
petitions delivered by groups of women are female-authored, but neither
assumption can claim much evidence to support it.38 The term “mock petition”
has become commonplace among critics referring to a series of petitions which
imitate the collective feminine voice of female-authored petitions but which
105
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
develop different arguments supported by sexually explicit anecdotes. Given that
women signed and delivered petitions written either collectively or on their
behalf, the question of female authorship may be secondary to the broader
question of whether female-authored petitions put forth women’s concerns in a
voice any more specific to female experience than mock petitions do. Assuming
that female-authored petitions offer an unqualified glimpse into the experiences
and concerns of 1640s women risks underplaying the political strategy and
rhetoric at work in women’s political activism. Exploring the rhetoric of femaleauthored petitions does, however, provide a useful frame of reference through
which to separate the reactionary elements of mock petitions from the elements
invented to communicate the mock-petitioner’s own political message.
The Humble Petition of Many Hundreds of Distressed Women,
Tradesmens Wives, and Widdowes (1642),39 for instance, possesses several
features common to female-authored petitions and absent in mock petitions, such
as the speakers’ emphasis on their sense of obligation and their commitment to a
set of shared religious convictions rather than to their material and emotional
needs. The Humble Petition begins with an account of all the women’s
unanswered petitions and an unwavering declaration that “having received no
satisfactory answere as of yet, inforceth us once againe to Petition this
Honourable House for answer to the same, in granting your Petitioners their just
desires and requests.”40 Stating that they have been forced to petition implies that
106
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
under ideal circumstances they would rather abstain from voicing their concerns
publicly, and even if this is not the case it is an effective rhetorical move designed
to capitalize on the irregularity and perceived unseemliness of women’s public
speech by making female activism another symptom of the disordered state the
petitioners seek to redress.41 The women, wives, and widows begin their petition
by laying out the financial hardships they suffer “through the great decay of
Trading,” but the reforms they seek emphasize their desire to protect their religion
even above their economic or personal interests, petitioning that relief be sent to
Protestant settlers in Ireland and that England be “put into a present posture of
Warre” against the Catholic rebellion in Ireland.42 Female-authored petitions, of
which The Humble Petition is typical, tend to express concern for the spiritual
direction of the state, not for the health (or pleasure) of its individual members.
Religion was easily the most contentious issue of the Civil Wars, and femaleauthored pamphlets make their opinions on religious issues known first and
foremost while mock petitions treat religion as a static, moral backdrop against
which to promote procreation as a spiritual duty.
When the female-authored petition A True Copie of the Petition of the
Gentlewomen, and Tradesmens-wives in and about the City of London does
mention sex, it is to compel parliament to intercede on behalf of Protestant
women in Ireland, where the petitioners assert that Irish soldiers employ rape as a
weapon of war.43 Of Ireland and the continuing “insolencies of the Papists and
107
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
their abbettors,” the petitioners remark that “the thoughts of [these] sad barbarous
events, maketh our tender hearts to melt within us, forcing us humbly to Petition
to this honourable Assembly.”44 The petitioners turn female frailty into a
rhetorical advantage, first excusing the disruptive nature of their public speech by
encoding it with an obligation to speak against Roman Catholicism and then by
tying their public speech to the feminine work of mourning in crying out for the
suffering of innocent Protestant women “whose Husbands or Parents” were not
“able to rescue” them from the conflict.45 “[W]e wish wee had no cause to speake
of those insolencies, and savage usage and uneard [sic] of rapes, excercised upon
our Sex in Ireland,” the petitioners write, and ask “have we not just cause to feare
that they wil prove the forerunners of our ruine, except Almighty GOD by the
wisdom and care of this Parliament be pleased to succor us”?46 Sexuality –
namely the “barbarous” and violent sexuality of the Catholic soldiers – is a
subject which the women associate strongly with their religious and ethnic others,
and about which they provide no explicit details that might serve to rouse a
potentially libidinous reader’s interest.
Since the threat against their chastity (combined with the Catholic threat
against their souls) obliged the authors of this petition to take public action, for
parliament to comply would be to remove the women’s obligation and herald a
return to the status quo of male speech and female silence. Yet this is not the
argument the petitioners make in A True Copie. Having presented their case that
108
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
the House of Commons should intercede on their behalf to convince the House of
Lords to “purge both the Court and Kingdome of that great Idolatrous Service of
the Masse” so as to avoid drawing “downe a greater curse upon the whole
Kingdome,” the petitioners lay out a series of arguments supported by scripture to
legitimize women’s right to petition parliament.47 “We doe it not out of any selfe
conceit, or pride of heart, as seeking to equall our selves with Men,” they write,
“But according to our places to discharge that duty we owe to God, and the cause
of the Church, as farre as lyeth in us, following herein the example of the Men,
which have gone in this duty before us.”48 Putting God always above the king and
parliament, who in 1641 were proving themselves increasingly fallible, the female
petitioners express that they feel themselves duty-bound to band together in a
single voice to defend England against popery. Parliament’s inability to reach a
univocal agreement on the matter of religious reform creates a kind of political
vacuum that female petitioners feel they have an obligation to fill. Newsbook
accounts of violent clashes between female petitioners and parliamentary forces
imply a certain extremism among female petitioners, but female-authored
petitions themselves tend on the whole to read as politically conservative and
measured in their requests for parliamentary action. That women in the thousands
expressed their obligation to physically petition parliament may have been radical
enough, and a comment on their lack of faith in parliament’s ability to govern the
country, but they do not agitate for a whole-scale reform of patriarchal hierarchy.
109
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
In many cases, it seems that female petitioners gathered to lend support to
a particular faction within parliament, as the petitioners of A True Copie gathered
to support the House of Commons in pressuring the House of Lords. The response
we have to such efforts, however, illustrates parliament’s inability to marshal such
support in productive ways. The pamphlet reprint of A True Copie includes a copy
of the petition as well as a record of parliament’s response, delivered by John
Pym, a vocal puritan MP. According to the pamphlet, Pym “came to the
Commons doore, and called for the Women, and spake unto them,”49 thanking
them for their petition and declaring that they “shall (God willing) receive from us
[the House of Commons] all the satisfaction which we can possibly give to your
just and lawfull desires.”50 Having thanked them, however, he then instructs them
to
repaire to your Houses, and turne your Petition which you have delivered
here, into Prayers at home for us; for we have bin, are, and shall be (to our
utmost power) ready to relieve you, your Husbands and Children, and to
perform the trust committed unto us, towards God, our King and Countrey,
as becometh faithfull Christian and Loyall Subjects.51
The reply could illustrate parliament’s unwillingness to accept women as
participants in political culture, since Pym not only asks that the women leave the
House of Commons but also that they turn their energy to praying inside their
homes and put their trust in their MPs. Marcus Nevitt notes that Pym’s
“authoritative remark strives to reinforce a gendered segregation of social space
and discursive activity across class hierarchies and to translate the register of
110
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
women’s political engagement into the (patriarchally oriented and endorsed)
language of devotion.”52 But Pym’s statement also does the ideological work of
painting over the differences between the petitioners and the parliament, as if their
goals are aligned, at a time when parliament itself was highly divided. Pym’s “us”
is just as fictional a conceit as the “we” of the large petition, except that in Pym’s
case historical records of parliamentary factionalism give us reason to doubt that
Pym’s “us” includes all of parliament, or even all the MPs of the House of
Commons.
Pym himself was a divisive figure, instrumental in documents like the
Petition of Right and The Grand Remonstrance which emphasized the king’s
accountability to parliament, and a vocal advocate of radical religious reform.53
While Pym, as a puritan committed to removing papist corruption in the church
and among the king’s councillors, likely shared and encouraged the concerns the
gentlewomen and tradesmens’s wives express in A True Copie, Pym could not
speak for the majority of MPs. Why then, when thousands of female petitioners at
the door might possibly put pressure on those MPs not aligned with Pym’s goals,
does Pym send women to pray at home? Part of the reason lies perhaps in the
political threat such organized petitions present to parliament in general. The fact
that women organize and mobilize themselves politically in such numbers, and
present such a united front, reflects poorly on a parliament which cannot reach an
accord with the king on pressing matters of religious reform and foreign policy
111
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
due to its inner divisions. In dismissing the female petitioners and painting
parliament as a united body committed to serving God, the king, and the country
(as if such service were clear and simply defined), Pym strives to maintain
parliament’s role (and the role of the male political agent) as the guarantor of
social order and hierarchy against an alternative vision of English politics in
which all subjects are able to organize and make demands of their leaders. Pym
seeks to neutralize the alternative view of England’s political future that the
female petitioners present, even though the specific terms of that future – a
rigorously Protestant state – serve his own interests. As the second wave of
female-authored petitions which followed the Second Civil War in 1647-8
demonstrates, Pym was not successful in the long term.54
Mock Petitions and Civil War Fantasies of Restored Patriarchal Order
Nevitt argues that the mock petitions which followed the first wave of
female-authored petitions in 1641-2 would, like Pym’s response to female
petitioners, attempt to restrict and reframe women’s political voice, rewriting
“material need … as sexual appetite” and transforming “the desire for political
agency” into “an insatiable and apparently collective libido.”55 Yet while these
mock petitions do parody female-authored petitions in their titles and basic layout,
they present a vision of England (and London in particular) that is so at odds with
that of most female-authored petitions that they depart from the realm of parody
112
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
and become fictions in and of themselves. Mock petitions adopt a narrative style,
rather than the argumentative style of genuine petitions, recounting in sexually
explicit terms the urban lifestyle made impossible by the Civil Wars and pleading
for a return to the status quo of excess and debauchery. The female speakers of
mock petitions, driven by sexual starvation, insist that England’s future prosperity
lies in their ability to conceive future generations of English gentlemen, and that
with the suitable men too busy fighting in the country to fornicate with them in
the city, England faces the future collapse of its population. Mock petitions
therefore open a space to critique the male parliament’s handling of the Civil
Wars while at the same time idealizing patriarchal rule and depicting men as
victims of war, personified as a devouring female in more than one mock petition.
While mock petitions borrow obviously from female-authored petitions,
their borrowings from complaint literature, whore dialogues, and other popular
genres often go unremarked. Early precursors to the mock petition, like The
Virgin’s Complaint of 1642, which does not style itself as a petition but which
adopts a collective female voice to protest the First Civil War, use the complaint
form to invoke many of the tropes which become hallmarks of the mock petition
genre. Complaint literature, particularly complaint poetry which featured “fallen
women” and other female characters as the principal speakers, became a “literary
craze” among male poets towards the end of the sixteenth century.56
Conventionally, complaint literature “tell[s] of a legendary figure who returns
113
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
from the dead to recount her misfortunes through an extended monologue, one
that wavers in tone between vindication, shame, and vengeance.”57 The Virgins
Complaint, which recounts the misfortunes of living “sundry virgins of the City of
London,” does not replicate the usual formula but instead adapts it to address in a
fictional context women’s increasingly public political voice as petitioners.
With respect to its attitude towards time, The Virgins Complaint provides a
link between the established complaint genre (popular in the late 1500s and
dealing with the past suffering of its speakers) and the emerging female petition
phenomenon (popular in the 1640s and outlining the measures to take to avoid the
future suffering of its speakers). Rather than lament past wrongs as the female
speakers of complaint poetry do, the virgins58 complain that War is consuming all
of the sexually desirable men in England and obstructing the system of sexual
exchange which gives order to the virgins’ lives. With all of their “sweethearts”
gone off to war, the virgins are made “with open mouths and free endeavours of
all the best parts about us” to “turne [their] owne solicitors” and list their present
and “increasing miseries.”59 Sexual innuendo pervades the pamphlet in sentences
like this where women’s “mouths” and “parts” refer at once to the organs of
speech and to female genitalia so that ‘solicitation’ refers both to arguing one’s
position publicly and to making one’s body publicly available for sex. The virgins
declare that “we are more damnified by these wars then any, but those who have
true feelings of our cases, can imagine,” and as readers are thus invited to “feel”
114
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
the virgins’ “cases,” cases meaning both their plight and their genitals. The
pamphlet then launches into a description of what life in London is like in the
absence of its able-bodied, virile young men. Driven by green-sickness, which
“feed[s] upon” the virgins “more ravenously then a Vulture, deflowering and
penetrating the precious colour of [their] complexions” and afflicting them with
“hideous and deathful longings, such as are oftentimes prejudicial to our wits,
which indeed depend rather on the satisfaction of our wills and bodies then of our
souls,” the virgins are forced to settle for the touch of “frosty-bearded Vsurers”
and “bungling fumblers.”60 The virgins recount that before the wars they “used to
walk to Islington and Pimlico, to eat Cakes, and drinke Christian Ale on Holydayes” with all of the gentlemen, courtiers, Cavaliers, able prentices, and
handsome journeymen that the city had to offer.61 They were “inforced to allure
with sheeps eyes, winks, and other provocations, the younger Gentlemen of [their]
fathers shops,” but they “never turned suitor away, had hee but a nose on his
face.”62
The virgins call for an end to the Civil Wars, so that they may be relieved
of their “long solitude, And [of] keeping their Virginities against their Wills.”63
Rather than engaging in political discourse and addressing the conflicts which
motivate the Wars, the virgins blame war itself by personifying it as a sexual rival
“far more ravenous and greedy then wee Maids are after Mans flesh.”64 By
opposing “War’ alone, the virgins conspicuously hold no political or religious
115
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
stake in the conflict between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers. Religion surfaces
only to lend scriptural support to the virgins’ sexual desire as a means of fulfilling
“the commandment given to [their] first parents, increase & multiply.”65 The
virgins lament lost opportunities for sexual dalliances, not marriage and
procreation, but they raise a coherent anti-war argument in observing that “since
we cannot have our wonted conjunction in a faire way, who are the breeders of
the Kingdome, there must needs be a great want of man-kind in all this Realme,
they still decreasing, as being slaine, and dying manifold other deaths, and few or
none springing up to supply their rooms.”66 Although much of the sex the virgins
recount seems more recreational than procreational, pornographic humour blends
into political commentary when the dearth of men gives rise to the vision of a
future in which “men shall be so scarce, that women must be confined to their
husbands and glad they can have them too; and when before one woman (by
report) would have served twenty men, one man must be faine to serve twenty
women, and yet all they can do not sufficient to content us maids.”67 That wives
should be forced to rely and depend on a single husband after the war whereas
they previously depended on many suitors reads as assertion that a multitude of
men (like parliament) serving one woman (England, or London) leads to disorder.
In light of parliament’s implied failure, we might infer that the rule of a single
man (like the king) could reign in the disorderly sexual impulses of London
116
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
women and wipe out the debauched London society that the virgins are nostalgic
for.
The virgins allude to the absence of male bodies in London, but their
fantasy of a future London devoid of men also becomes a powerful political
statement about the absence of masculinity in the more abstract, patriarchal sense.
Turning the First Civil War, which represents a fundamental breakdown of
patriarchal hierarchy into a sexual rivalry between women over men, removes
responsibility for the war from the parliamentary and royal governments
themselves. War, like a wife serviced by multiple husbands when allowed to roam
unchecked, makes an easy scapegoat for whichever figurative ‘husband’ or single
voice of patriarchal order comes to quell her. That this ‘husband’ is missing in
action provides an uncertain, apocalyptic vision of England’s future. The addition
of the “mournfull Dittie,” a two verse song which appears at the end of the second
edition of the pamphlet printed a month after it first appeared in January of 1642,
remedies the absence of masculinity by appealing to its masculine readers to fill
the void. The Dittie begins by addressing any reader who has felt “pittie” in
reading the “Dittie” to “Doe your endeavours / To cure our fevers.”68 Rather than
call for an end to the Civil Wars, however, the virgins call to their readers “If you
be men to heale us body and soule, / Give us some oyle of man to make us
whole.” The later pun on ‘whole’ – “Only one thing which makes us thus condole,
/ the oyle of man can cure us in the hole” – invites male readers to produce semen
117
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
after reading the pamphlet much the way an actor might invite applause at the end
of a play.69 The pamphlet calls on readers to produce “oyle of man” by
masturbating to the pamphlet’s arousing content, but it also puts out a more
socially cohesive call for men to return and “cure” women of their greensickness.
Since the disorderly public actions and speech of the virgins, War, and the wives
of the pamphlet are all perceived to be motivated by women’s unmet sexual
needs, the call for male readers to perform sexually is a figurative call for men to
return from the Wars and reassert control over women, thereby reasserting a
patriarchal order disrupted by conflict between rival patriarchs. The virgins are
less interested in proposing a solution to the conflicts between Charles I and the
parliament, and more interested in convincing the gentlemen, tradesmen, and
other middle-class men to give up their martial and political pursuits against one
another and return to their duties as heads of household (duties which include
satisfying their wives and fathering children).
The mock petitions of 1642-3, such as The Resolution of Women of
London to Parliament and The Mid-wives Just Petition, adopt the petition format
but share many of the tropes and jokes of The Virgins Complaint (1642). The
Resolution, for instance, outlines women’s joy that husbands have gone to war
because now that they are gone women may “drink, feast, and walk abroad; and if
we have a mind to it, keepe and maintaine a friend, that upon occasion may doe us
pleasure.”70 Although these women petition parliament to continue rather than end
118
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
the war, they voice the same desire for perpetual sexual pleasure that the virgins
did. The Midwives Just Petition (1643) reprises the sexualization of war,
threatening that “wives may no longer spare their husbands to be devoured by the
sword, but may keep them fast locked within their own loving armes day and
night, perfecting their embraces in such a manner as is not to be expressed freely,
but may be easily conceived by the strong fancy of any understanding women.”71
Calling on the “strong fancy” of “understanding” women highlights the role
fantasy plays in fleshing out the sexual innuendo of these mock petitions, and
although the speakers appeal to female fantasy specifically, the pamphlet
ultimately fulfills the patriarchal fantasy that women are preoccupied with sex to
the exclusion of almost all other topics. Neither pamphlet adopts a clear political
position, but both employ a sexualized, collective female persona to emphasize
the disruptive effects of the Wars in London.
The City-Dames Petition likewise combines sexual fantasy with political
commentary by using the collective female voice of city women to portray 1647
London as a sexual wasteland and constructing Caroline London, by contrast, as a
place of unlimited sexual opportunity. City-Dames signals its porno-political
nature first through the names of its “authors,” Mrs. L. Stradling, Ma. Lecher, Sa.
Lovesick, P. Horne, Mrs. E. Overdooe, A. Troublesome, and others. Stradling et
al. call for the Cavaliers’ return to London, hoping that they will bring back the
riotous fun and loose morals London currently lacks. Despite its seemingly119
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
royalist position, however, the pamphlet is largely bi-partisan in its willingness to
poke fun at both the Cavaliers for being oversexed gallants and at parliament by
depicting it as a woman impregnated after “lying so long with the Commonwealth.”72
The city-dames73 begin by raising seemingly legitimate concerns about the
interruption of trade, the expense of the continuing war, and parliament’s
accountability to Londoners, whose support fuelled the Second Civil War and
who stand to lose the most should parliament be defeated.74 As evidence to
support their anti-war arguments, Stradling et al. provide narratives which
juxtapose a lush atmosphere of excess and consumption before the war with
desolate scenes of London emptied of its men. The city-dames’ shops, “which
heretofore were fragrant as the springs first showers, occasioned by gallants
frequent visits,” are now “like houses haunted with spirits,” they recount.75 The
city-dames likewise long for the days when “every Citizens wife of any quality,
was occupied in her several vocation,” when their husbands might “freely take the
aire, or go to their country houses, whilst we had those at our command to act
their parts in the City, which was a good contentment (good soules) to them.”76
The London described before the Civil Wars is a gallant’s fantasy and a husband’s
nightmare, although within the fictional context of the narrative the city-dames
assure the reader that the husbands are content to let their wives sleep with “those
at [their] command,” be they their household servants or the nobles, knights, and
120
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
gentlemen customers who frequent their shops.77 City-husbands, the dames write,
are loath to “bee forced … to work at night” and appreciate other men’s assistance
in satisfying their wives.78 While most historians would argue that the Civil Wars
produced a golden age of sexual excess by triggering Charles II’s continental
exile and the subsequent libertine culture of the Restoration, Stradling et al. argue
that the Civil Wars spell the end of sexual libertinism and the beginning of a
bleak, pleasure-less future. “But now the case is altered,” the city-dames
complain, “let us have ever so good commodities not a chapman is left to
cheapen, which will occasion a horrible inconvenience in time; we shall not have
a sonne but of the City breed, borne with a what doe you lacke? In his mouth, or
the issue of some fowle mouthed fellow.”79 With the departure of their wealthy
clientele, the city-dames see a future in which they will be reduced to intercourse
with chapmen, who hawk goods with cries of “what doe you lacke?” They
likewise predict that they will be cheapened as commodities (punning both on
their social value as respectable wives and on the sense of ‘commodity’ as
vagina), cheapened by the low birth of their sexual partners (as compared to the
higher class suitors they had enjoyed before), and robbed of what upward social
mobility they possessed as merchants’ wives.
Visions of a future generation of Londoners debased by foul-mouthed,
noisy children might seem to provide a disincentive towards extramarital
sexuality, although such visions are counteracted by a pro-sex fantasy of
121
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
widespread female sexual availability which asserts that women will always seek
sexual intercourse, even when desirable partners are no longer available. Indeed, a
future London emptied of socially and sexually desirable men seems like it would
make a horrible setting for a pleasurable erotic fantasy unless its readers believed
themselves to be part of that class of undesirable men and enjoyed imagining that
wealthy women might soon find them irresistible. Since abstinence is never an
option for these greensick faux-female petitioners, the absent Cavaliers and the
parliament who will not let them return to London take the blame for failing this
future, “City breed” generation. Without courtiers, knights, and merchants to
father them, these children will not grasp the graces of masculine comportment
but will instead conduct themselves in noisy, foul-mouthed ways. They might at
worst behave as the authors believe socially inferior chapmen do, but the model of
chapman behaviour the pamphlet presents also resonates as a depiction of men in
parliament, who like chapmen talk noisily and publicly over one another. The
City-bred sons will pose a threat to patriarchal order, as they will lack the
fundamental qualities of deference, civility, and self-restraint which mark elite
masculinity as a position of high social privilege. The return of elite men might
avert such a future, but since by 1647 it is clear that many soldiers would never
return from the wars, the corruption of English masculine stock seems inevitable.
The City-Dames Petition therefore borrows a female voice not to challenge men’s
122
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
exclusive rights to positions of political power, but to lament the fact that after the
wars there would be no suitable men to fill these positions.
The Humble Petition of many Thousands of Wives and Matrons of the City
of London, which alludes to The Virgins Complaint and appeared at around the
same time in February 1642, mobilizes this same argument that continued
hostilities forestall the conception of an honourable generation of Englishmen.
Unlike the 1647 City-Dames Petition, however, the Thousands of Wives petition
hyper-sexualizes its speakers in far more subtle ways. The pamphlet begins by
setting sex at distance from the argument at hand, invoking agricultural metaphors
which serve as polite euphemisms rather than obscene descriptions in sentences
like: “it is not unknowne to the whole kingdome of England … that Wives are
those who people and replenish the Common-wealth with inhabitants,” since “it is
impossible, that fields alone without corne should bring forth fruit, or that corne
should multiply without being cast into good ground: so it is impossible mankinde
should be continued, or succession maintained, without the help of Wives.”80 Sex
obliquely referenced here guarantees the thousands of wives their stake in
England’s political future and legitimizes their political voice through their future
sons. The speakers challenge the “many malicious and ungracious reports cast
upon us Women,” “all which aspersions we returne upon the vile and scandalous
Authors, who in the height of their Wine have branded us with these ignominious
calumnies.”81 The wives engage in entertaining ad hominem arguments, opposing
123
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
misogynist invective by attacking the masculine virtue of the individual
misogynists in question. Yet as the pamphlet continues, its tone shifts
dramatically, as the wives explain that the “scandalous Authors” have defamed
them “because we would not permit them to lime their twigs at our Plum-trees,
nor to inoculate our stocks with their grafts.”82 The speakers retain the agricultural
metaphor, but they move from discussing conception, a pro-social expression of
marital sexuality given that they speak as “wives,” to discussing adulterous sexual
activity where specific words like “twigs” and “Plum-trees” stand in for genitalia.
The reference to The Virgins Complaint on the title page suggests that The
Humble Petition was not genuinely authored by women, but it experiments with a
female perspective in ways that make it similar to female-authored petitions and
similar to what the mock petition genre would become by 1647.
The fantasy of pre-war London that the thousands of wives present differs
in some respects from that of the virgins or the city-dames in that it focuses on
procreative sexuality, but the recurring ties between agricultural fertility, sexual
fecundity, and prosperity turn Civil War London into the same recognizable
wasteland without its men. The thousand wives lament that “wheras before the
beginning of these wars, each of us good Wives, either by the due benevolence of
our Husbands, or the charitable assistance of our friends, whome we respected in
the nature of Husbands, could every yeare for the most part bring forth fruit in due
season, without lying idle like fallow and untilled fields,” their husbands and
124
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
friends’ departure means “we walk desolate like Widdowes, with our bellies
flat.”83 The “common harlots” are still “having some customers” in “this dearth
of mans flesh,” but the wives are doomed to “wander” since “not one man among
a hundred, since the departure of the Courtiers and Cavaliers … hath so much
honesty as to aske a married woman the question or offer his body to her
service.”84 The wives paint a fantasy of pre-Civil War libertine life that resembles
that of the city-dames but focuses on the sexual pleasures of London
entertainments rather than the avenues for sexual trade offered by the city-dames’
shops. The wives, like the city-dames, had husbands who provided stability and
comfort and “friends” who “used with such pleasure to solace and recreate our
[the wives’s] bodies at Tavernes and other places, paying for our going in to
playes, and installing us in triumph in the halfe crowne boxes.”85 The pamphlet
idealizes a debauched vision of city life where wives are sexually available to
anyone who can afford to entertain them, husbands are uninterested or unable to
limit their wives’ sexual availability, and children are celebrated and secure in the
households they are born into regardless of paternity. In the Civil War present,
where wives can find no desirable partners, they can only “be beholding to those
who have the palsie in all their joynts, decrepid old men, that cannot lift up any
part about us, nor stand at all to elevate our directions for paines and aches.”
Women must “in the meantime tyre our soules, and consume the flesh of our
bodies within pinings and mental conception, such as may call to our
125
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
remembrance only to trouble our fancies,” meaning essentially that they must
imagine or fantasize “the past banquets we used daily and nightly to taste, when
as they say we eat sweet meats with spoones and rioted in dainties.”86 Given the
strong connection between producing food and producing offspring in the
pamphlet, the “past banquets” the women conjure up take on connotations of
sexual consumption and fertility, emphasizing the lush possibilities of sexual
pleasure in the past, the base and unfruitful of sex in the present, and the
impossibility of satisfying procreative sex in a future populated by the bastard
children of common whores.
The petition concludes with the wives’ reflections on such a future should
parliament not call an end to the Civil Wars. They fear that their husbands will
die, but they also fear that if they “should lose these Husbands, that we shall not
suddenly get new ones, for though we care not much for them, yet we know,
according to the old Proverbe, that seldome comes a better, and therefore we
should gladly rest ourselves contented with these we have.”87 Here they express
through their sexual relationships a broader social conservatism by asserting that
they should hold on to their ‘husbands,’ key figures of top-down patriarchal order,
even though they are discontented with them. They then suggest that
surely this taking away of our friends, whom we set in the first place and
our Husbands from us, was a judgment of Heaven upon us for our sinnes
and iniquities; for before, when each of us had a loving and kinde husband
as ever laid leg over woman, we were not contented with them, but still
126
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
desired change… and so hath happened to us as to covetous wretches, who
striving to increase their state lose all they had before.88
The end of The Humble Petition has the thousands of wives and matrons
themselves taking the blame for the Civil Wars as a “divine judgement” on their
failure to find satisfaction with their husbands. That they “desired change” in this
context means that their desire for their husbands plus “a friend or two or three in
a corner besides” has turned their paradise of entertainments into a fallen, barren
place.
The pamphlet taps into traditional narratives of original sin to a clear
political end. The notion of multiple male partners pleasuring a single woman
undoes the patriarchal structure by which there should be a series of single rulers
– husbands – ruling over a host of multiple dependents. Since the friends are
explicitly the “Courtiers and Cavaliers” of London, they defy the so-called
“natural” social hierarchy by dallying with women and vying against each other
when they should be working to be or become heads of households. That the
thousands of wives desired multiple friends, and not a single man to supplant a
husband, also connotes a desire for either a decentralized male order where no
single man possesses an ultimate authority or, perhaps more threateningly, a
centralized female order where women command all of the economic and sexual
resources of men. From either perspective, in desiring change the wives have in
essence abandoned a monarchical system for a more republican model of
127
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
relations. If we see the wives as an analogy for parliament, which abandoned its
marriage to the king so that it could enjoy the affections and entertainments of
multiple partners, the pamphlet is making the political statement that parliament
should not forsake the king to go searching for a “better” head of state who will
not come. By ceding central authority and power to an admittedly less satisfying
husband, England could have saved itself from Heaven’s judgement and enjoyed
a feast of sexual delights.
Mock petitions such as these present fantasies of seeming sexual disorder
as a means of theorizing equally unreal ideals of social and political order.
Fantasies of sexual promiscuity before the Wars appear to signal order through
their attention to fertility, male potency, and female discretion while wartime
sexual starvation, bodily decay, and women’s public speech signal political
disorder. If we read these mock petitions as royalist texts, we can observe the
seemingly contradictory discourses of political conservatism and sexual
libertinism co-mingling in the petitions’ nostalgia for a libertine Caroline period
that will not come into recognizable existence until the Restoration. If we read
these mock petitions as anti-royalist texts, however, we can also discern a
fundamental discomfort with the excesses and abuses of elite urbanites which is
displaced onto elite urban women in particular.
The particular mock-female petitions I have explored in this section
satirize the petition genre by using it as a vehicle to provide a sexual fantasy of
128
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
urban life. But while the mock-petitions provide readers with a pleasurable sexual
fantasy, I contend that they also provide a political fantasy that fulfills the
ideological needs of the patriarchal order it appears to be satirizing. The petition,
as a genre which seeks to influence the future by motivating those in positions of
power to take particular action, provides a glimpse into the kinds of political
fantasies sparked specifically by the breakdown of the existing political hierarchy
between king and parliament. As Suzuki writes in the introduction to Subordinate
Subjects, “more than a century before the French Revolution, the petitions by
apprentices and women in England give expression – however inchoate – for
perhaps the first time to an egalitarian imaginary and democratic pluralism. By the
very act of petitioning, both groups were claiming political rights they did not
possess.”89 These porno-political petitions mock genuine female-led petitions, but
they do not primarily attack women’s imagined political right to protest. Instead,
mock petitions often end up curiously validating female protest by empowering
female voices as vehicles for other political messages which are quite separate
from the original messages of the petitions they mock. Where female-authored
petitions typically give an account of past and present social disorder, violence,
and sin as a means of convincing parliament to take measures to ensure an
ordered, peaceful, and virtuous future, mock petitions by contrast imagine an
idealized past marked by excessive and often immoral pleasures and petition for a
restoration of this former time. From a modern vantage point, the future presented
129
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
by the mock petitions seems closest to the eventual outcome of the Civil Wars.
With Charles II’s restoration, libertine culture flourished in England and made
possible the sexual freedom and luxury consumption the mock petitioners wanted.
Ironically, the mock petitions’ political message seems to prompt a reader to
reject the obviously-faux-petitioners, who parody femininity rather than pass as
female petitioners, and to reject their debauched fantasy of pre-war London, no
matter how enjoyable it might seem. In recognizing the mock petitions as drag
performances and as fantasies of extramarital, non-reproductive sexual relations
which would have disastrous consequences if realized, readers are meant to reject
radical attempts to reform the English political system and to embrace pre-war
patriarchal hierarchy. Yet in satirizing populist female activism, mock-petitions
seem to have hit almost by accident on a vein of politically conservative yet
liberal fantasy of what London life might offer.
Female Parliaments and the Second Civil War
Suzuki observes two distinct phases in women’s active Civil War
petitioning, one in 1642 when women “joined the general petitioning against the
decay of trade and against episcopacy” and a second phase in 1648-9 when
“Leveller women petitioned against the imprisonment of their leaders.”90 Mock
petitions, ranging from c. 1642 to 1647, respond to the first phase of female
130
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
petitioning. The second phase of petitioning, which reflects the growing influence
and importance of the reformist Leveller movement in London, coincides with a
series of texts published in late 1647-8 which critique parliament by feminizing it
in personified form or by feminizing its members. 91 In this subsection of my
chapter, I read first the Mistris Parliament series of 1648 and then Henry
Neville’s A Parliament of Ladies (1647) to explore how portrayals of parliament
as a promiscuous woman and of a parliament composed of disorderly women
(respectively) operate as a means of both political critique and patriarchal
fantasy.92 While imagining the parliament of England as a sexualized woman
turns a disparate, abstract political body in flux into a knowable voice easily
critiqued and dismissed, the feminizing of parliament also reifies masculinity as
the ‘naturally’ dominant gender by demonstrating that it was not the patriarchal
institutions which failed. Rather, it was the men who temporarily occupied those
institutions who failed to live up to a properly masculine ideal. By giving
parliament the persona of a lustful woman, satirists were able to critique the men
who held positions of power in England without critiquing the patriarchal system
which reserved these positions of power for elite men.
The Mistris Parliament series consists of five pamphlets published in
May-June93 of 1648 which present in dialogue form the story of how a pregnant
Mrs. Parliament gives birth to a monster attended by the personified Mrs. London,
Mrs. Truth, Mrs. Sedition, Mrs. Synod, etc. The series coincided with a
131
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
particularly tumultuous moment near the conclusion of the Second Civil War. In
the five-week span of the pamphlets’ publication, parliament’s army resolved at a
general meeting to “call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for the
blood he had shed,”94 2,000 men petitioned parliament to restore King Charles I,
carrying with them over 30,000 signatures in one of the largest organized protests
of the period, and rioting led by royalist agitators broke out in Kent, reaching the
outskirts of London.95 Thomas Fairfax (army commander-in-chief) successfully
quelled the Kentish uprising by early June before it reached London, but in light
of parliament’s fears that London might also rise against them should petitioners
and agitators flood into the city, parliament sealed London off from the rest of the
country, blocking off the London bridge and cancelling ferry services.96 Royalist
propaganda, including royalist satires like the Mistris Parliament series, therefore
capitalized on a volatile moment in the spring of 1648 when it looked like the tide
might turn in favour of the royalist forces.
As royalist propaganda, the series represents parliament as a woman in
order to insult its members and attack their masculinity. The first pamphlet,
Mistris Parliament Brought to Bed of a Monstrous Childe of Reformation,
introduces Mrs. Parliament as “a Gentlewoman of “quality and breeding” now “to
be despised by every sause-boxe boy, and loose fellow to make Rimes as they call
them, and sing-songs of her, making of her a Whore.”97 Parliament, the Nurse
recounts, has “imprisoned her Husband” (referring to Charles I, who was
132
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
imprisoned on the Isle of Wight), “prostituted her body to a very Eunuch, that had
nothing to help himself with at all,” “followed the Camp,” and has since “turn’d
up her tayle to every lowsy Ill-dependent Rascall in the Army; Sir Thomas
[Fairfax] himself and king Cromwall too, a very Town-Bull, and committed flat
fornication with Broom-men, Tinkers, and Channell-rakers.”98 The fantasy of an
adulterous, indiscriminate parliament willing to couple with the lowest of the low
in English society conveys the long parliament’s disorderly conduct in an
entertaining and embarrassing way.
John Crouch, the likely author of the pseudonymous Mistris Parliament
series, uses sexual promiscuity as a means of theorizing the political problems of
polyvocality within the English Parliament. In 1648 Presbyterian MPs still
struggled against the army-supported Independents, the House of Lords struggled
against the House of Commons only to see most of their members purged, and the
Leveller movement created factions and divides within the army-Independent
groups over proposed reforms. The fantasy of parliament as a female body turns a
body composed of men at odds with one another into a unitary body. Imagining
parliament as female and pregnant emphasizes not only that parliament should
obey the king but that parliament should be a vessel to nurture the king’s policies.
Parliament should, in the traditional family-state analogy, be governed and
impregnated by her husband, which makes her promiscuity a comment on the lack
133
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
of a central, guiding direction among the parliament of England’s actual policy
makers.
Turning the parliament of England into a promiscuous woman therefore
serves to turn a disparate political body into a single, flawed entity in possession
of a conscience and able to be held accountable for crimes and sins committed.
Indeed, once the Nurse has recounted Mrs. Parliament’s sexual deviance the
pamphlet shifts away from the celebration of Mrs. Parliament’s sexual exploits to
the punishment she receives in the form of a monstrous child. The Nurse calls in
Mrs. London as a midwife, but London refuses to help, cursing Mrs. Parliament to
“languish still” and bring forth “the bastard Issue of thy own Lust thy own self,
which was begot in obscenity.”99 Mrs. Parliament confesses her sins and begs for
London’s prayers as she enters labour, but she still delivers a monster by the
pamphlet’s end. Purkiss analyzes this pamphlet at length in her consideration of
monstrous birth narratives published during the Civil War period, arguing that
Mrs. Parliament’s monstrous birth “symbolises and enacts the troubled state of the
kingdom.”100 Mrs. Parliament not only gives birth to a monster at the end of the
pamphlet, she also spends much of her labour vomiting up foul-smelling signs of
her sins, from the gold she received for selling out her God, King, and soul, to
“the accused Declaration against [her] King,”101 to the “innocent blood” of those
high ranking officials parliament sentenced to death.102 As Purkiss observes,
“Mrs. Parliament’s extrusion of the horrors within her positions the female body
134
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
as cause of and sign for disorderly rule, and the loathsome smells and pollutions
she emits are signs of political as well as physical corruption.”103 The monstrous
child itself has “a deformed shape without a head,” “great goggle eyes,” “bloody
hands growing out of both sides of its devouring panch,” and the feet of a
“Beare.”104 We learn in a later pamphlet that this monster grows up to become
“Ordinance,” an allegorization of the bureaucratic tool through which parliament
exerted its power over England.
While for Purkiss the monster “substitutes for a more unsettling display of
the open female body itself,” we can add further dimension to Purkiss’s reading
by exploring the political implications of the monster’s features. The monster’s
headlessness alludes to the king’s unnatural absence in state affairs by playing off
the allegory of the body as a state where the ruler should be the head. The
monster’s mix of animal features also suggests that it is the product of multiple
fathers. The nurse’s account of Mrs. Parliament’s sexual adventures makes the
possibility of multiple fathers seem credible, but we might also remember that
parliament’s body allegorizes multiple men, so that the monster’s cross-speciation
might reflect the internal multiplicities within parliament herself. That the monster
is born headless further demonstrates that a polyvocal body made up of men vying
for control of parliament can only produce corrupted instruments of power which
lack vision, leadership, and decisiveness. The class differences between the men
Mrs. Parliament associates with – from her royal husband to base tinkers and
135
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
channel rakers – likewise serve to make parliament’s claims to represent the
people of England seem dangerous, as if any man in England might use the
parliament as a vessel to bring his own political aims to fruition. Parliament’s
“sexual unruliness,” Purkiss argues, “is crucial for the royalist politics of the
dialogues,” as “Mistress Parliament’s adulterousness reinstates the notion that
social order is dependent on female fidelity to the husband; as in the monster
pamphlets, a monstrous swerve away from reproduction is the consequence of a
feminine instability that refuses its proper role of container or receptacle for the
agency of man.”105 We might add that the allegorization of parliament as a
receptacle for the agency of man is an equally political statement about the nature
of ordered, patriarchal rule.
Although the pamphlet focuses on condemning and punishing Mrs.
Parliament to promote royalist rebellion in London, representing parliament as a
woman also surprisingly enables readers to idealize parliament’s potential purity.
As an institution given a single voice and soul, Mrs. Parliament can confess,
suffer, and be redeemed in the pamphlet in ways that parliament as an institution
cannot be. Further, giving parliament a single, female voice also enables the
fantasy that parliament actually is a body capable of making reasonable choices
and behaving like an individual when in reality parliament is the sum of a
collection of individual opinions and agendas. Extracting grandees like Fairfax
and Cromwell as independent agents and possible fathers of the monster, when
136
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
they should logically have been subsumed within parliament’s body of her
‘Army’ suitor, also makes it possible to blame individual members for
parliament’s decisions rather than blame the faceless institution itself.
While John Crouch depicts parliament as an unruly woman’s body, Henry
Neville depicts parliament as a body of unruly women in A Parliament of Ladies
(1647), illustrating that there was more than one move to feminize parliament in
response to the political uncertainty of 1647-8. A Parliament of Ladies critiques
parliamentary process and mocks the long parliament by demonstrating how
easily MPs can overstep the bounds of their traditional role and get carried away
by endlessly re-imagining how to reform the state. Set in ancient Rome, and
inspired perhaps by Aristophanes’s play Assemblywomen, Neville’s narrative
begins with a young boy named Papirium returning from a day at the senate with
his father. When the boy’s mother asks him what decisions the senate made that
day, the boy, “apprehending” that he was “not to reveale” senate affairs to those
not allowed to enter the exclusively male space, “remained silent.”106 “[B]ut his
mother,” the narrator continues, “importuning him, and threatening him, with the
rod, that unless he would acquaint her with all their proceedings, she would whip
him soundly,” forces Papirium to tell his mother something of the senate’s
proceedings.107 The boy lies to his mother about what the senators resolved,
fearful of the “prejudice that might happen, if he should have revealed the Secrets
of the Senate.”108 To preserve his masculine power by containing the secret while
137
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
his mother attempts to assert her parental power over him by beating it out of him,
Papirium tells his mother “that they had made a Decree, and establish it, that it
should be lawfull for every man to have two Wives.”109 Caught between
masculine privilege and youthful vulnerability, he invents a statute legalizing
polygamy that would undermine the hierarchical structure of the household by
introducing multiple wives to destabilize his mother’s power.
To block the senate’s polygamy legislation, Papirium’s mother summons
the women of Rome to her parlour and together they form their own female
parliament to rival their husbands’ senate. The boy’s misinformation makes the
female parliament’s radical re-imagination of patriarchal hierarchy possible, but it
contains it as well by making the reader party to the knowledge that patriarchal
hierarchy was never in any danger to begin with. The women’s arguments against
polygamy, however, have discernible implications as a critique of the polyvocal
politics of 1640s England, implications which reach beyond the narrative frame of
the pamphlet. Initially, and to the sarcastic surprise of the unsympathetic narrator,
the parliament of ladies seems orderly: “every one took their places according to
their degrees: and which was a wonder among Women, they suffered one to speak
at once.”110 The problems the parliament of ladies identify with polygamy unfold
in a likewise orderly fashion. The ladies agree that they do not oppose the
measure out of sexual jealousy but on the grounds that it will be a waste of
resources and will eliminate a wife’s ability to effectively manage her husband’s
138
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
household. As the mother of the boy says, “shall a man desire to have to have two
Wives, that (alas) with all he can doe, can hardly please one? Nay, grant them to
two, in time they will grow to ten, from ten to twenty, and then what a racket
there would be, who should rule the Roast[sic]?”111 Although the women have
formed a parliament in order to concentrate their political voice and power, their
arguments against polygamy ironically reveal their fears that their households will
become polyvocal parliaments of wives, and that this will interfere with their
ability to manage their households in peace. In order to prevent such parliaments
and maintain their status as single, univocal forces within their households, they
resolve to counter the senate’s bogus resolution by proposing that every woman
have two or three husbands – exchanging polygamy for polyandry.
The move to create parliaments of husbands accountable to a single wife
seems like an inelegant solution to the problems of noise and disorder they assert
that polygamy will raise. But the switch to polyandry neatly emphasizes the
gender reversal that informs the humour of the pamphlet in ways that a steadfast
defence of heterosexual monogamy would not. While up to this point the ladies
pass more or less as believable women, at this point the characters begin to slip
into parodic drag. Individual lines within the pamphlet, such as “we have tongues
to tell our own Tales, and our Tales shall be heard and handled” capture the
sexually explicit, parodic strategy of the pamphlet, which is to mix sinceresounding proto-feminist rhetoric with sexual puns that undercut women’s
139
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
credibility and sincerity – essentially putting the sexualized female voice into the
mouths of the imagined proto-feminists.112 The misogynistic joke at the heart of
the pamphlet is not that the women believe the boy’s lie, however; it is that they
believe that the answer to the boy’s mother’s question of “who should rule the
Roast” is the wife, when most patriarchal authorities would answer that while a
wife rules a household, a husband ultimately rules over a wife. Believing that their
husbands have abused their power in the senate to threaten family stability, the
parliament of ladies extrapolates a new vision of what society might look like if
multiple men were to serve women. By re-envisioning the fundamental structure
of marriage, even if they have been provoked to do so through false information,
the parliament of ladies stands in for the parliament of England, which likewise
had to imagine a new world order after it broke its traditional union with the king.
Initially the parliament of ladies in the pamphlet is a model of univocality,
decisive action, and order. Class lines are clearly drawn between higher and lower
houses, but every woman seems content to maintain the hierarchies between them
that govern social action outside parliament for the sake of their common cause.
The parliamentary decorum lasts until they have resolved to replace polygamy
with polyandry and exchange patriarchy for matriarchy, but once they have agreed
on this course of action and begin to “consult” on how they will enact laws to
“rest the power in men for wrongdoing their wives, that thence forward they
might live in more ease, pride, pomp, and liberty,” decorum gives way to a series
140
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
of frivolous, tangential, and sexually explicit arguments and personal
narratives.113 Elenor Ever-crosse requests that a “Law might be made, that no
woman should suffer her selfe to be thumpt but as she ought to be,” blending a
call for stronger laws against domestic abuse with a tacit encouragement of sexual
violence.114 Dorothy Doe-little “hold[s] it requisite also, that every woman of
sense should take delight to please her eye with the most curious objects, either of
such pictures as we like, or such men as we love,” making men the objects of
sexual exchange.115 Bridget Boldface imagines reversing the typical operation of
couverture by which wives exist as their husband’s property by arguing that “If
the Husbands be ours, then their goods are ours, their Lands ours, their Cash and
Coyne ours” to use in establishing comfortable lives for themselves at home while
their husbands work. “Why, when they be prodigall abroad,” Boldface says,
“should we be penurious at home? Nay, let us eat good fare, keepe good fires,
want nothing.”116 Women seek to invert the patriarchal hierarchy on all points,
imagining a legal system which makes male pleasure secondary to female
pleasure, but in each case the ladies of the parliament seek power to abuse it. The
members of the parliament of ladies concern themselves with consumption,
leisure, and luxury at the expense of their husbands and in this way set themselves
up to seem more exploitative than their husbands because of the perceived
unnaturalness of their position on top.
141
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
The women’s ability to gather and share common stories of spousal
oppression and abuse provides them with a unifying sense of empowerment that
enables their political voice. But the parliament of ladies, like the long parliament,
fractures along class lines once they confront the source of their unifying
resentment. As consultation on the laws of the new matriarchy continues, Rachel
Rattlebooby longs for silk gowns and satin petticoats that her husband cannot
provide (and which sumptuary laws may prohibit her from wearing given that her
husband says they are “above my Calling”).117 Rattlebooby proposes that if a
woman should marry a second man above her station, she and her husband should
gain the status of this second husband.118 At this proposal, the members disagree
loudly. Neville writes that “some were unwilling that it should passe, yet the
major part were so fully bent, that it was set downe by the she-Scrivener in Paper,
and after in Parchment, to be endorsed.”119 This unleashes more dissent and
discussion of a particularly graphic nature concerning how women might use men
for sex, support, and comfort until finally the narrator recounts that the “general
silence” grew “to a mere confusion: for the rest having much matter to utter, some
got up to the tongues end & had not the patience to stay the time, and take their
turns: but all of these who had not yet spoke, tumultuously breaking out into
clamour, every one desiring to be heard first, and the more they were heard, the
less they were understood.”120 Papirium’s mother finally calls for silence, the
session concludes, and the articles are agreed on, but in setting out for the senate
142
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
house the narrator specifies that they have “no common pace.” The parliament
then comes face to face with a puzzled and “amazed” senate, which, upon
discovering “how all this business came about” through Papirium’s mother,
dismisses the women completely: “some laught, some lowred, some reserved for
pleasure, to others for perplexity; but in conclusion, they greatly condemned their
wives levity and inconstancie, but indulgently commended the Lads silence and
taciturnity.”121 Revealing Papirium’s deception restores order by making the very
premise of the parliament of ladies’s claim to power unsound.
The joke of A Parliament of Ladies seems on the surface to be that the
women of Rome delude themselves into thinking they can invert patriarchal
hierarchy and assert their own superiority over their husbands. Their predictable
failure reaffirms the patriarchal distribution of power and maintains the status quo
in that regard. In so far as the parliament of ladies operates as an allegory for the
long parliament, however, Neville accomplishes a complex critique of
parliament’s intentions to make England a more efficient and equitable place in
light of its limitations as a polyvocal assembly of individuals across social classes.
Both parliaments are capable of finding common ground in uniting against their
perceived oppressor, but both suffer from an inability to maintain a consensus and
from deep-rooted class distinctions which make it impossible for them ultimately
to re-imagine a political world without oppression. Whether the husbands in the
senate are the ideal rulers of Rome seems ancillary to the point the pamphlet
143
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
makes that a parliament of ladies, like parliaments in general, provides no feasible
alternative to the traditional institutions of power it attempts to replace.
That Neville couches this social commentary in bawdy stories of women
seeking multiple sexual partners speaks perhaps to the powers of fantasy, like
festive drag performance, to provide a safe space for radical re-imaginings of the
status quo. In the end, the joke may be that the long parliament is so like the
parliament of ladies that the Roundheads might as well be women themselves,
usurping positions of power that rightly belong to a higher male authority (the
king and his appointed councillors). Or, perhaps more cynically, the joke may be
that despite the good intentions of its members, a republican system of
government which attempts to represent and serve all segments of its populace
will inevitably sap the masculine authority from its members until they become
noisy, boisterous, and dismissible (i.e., feminine). Although the parliament of
ladies disbands as quickly as it was founded, the pamphlet itself had a long life,
reappearing twice before the Restoration and once again during the exclusion
crisis of the 1680s. The pamphlet’s ability to safely critique parliamentary
procedure, and in particular its ability to demonstrate the consequences of a
parliament which gets so carried away with itself that it oversteps its assigned
boundaries (as parliament arguably did in 1680 by demanding that Charles II
remove his Catholic brother from the line of succession), may have served as a
convenient means of venting frustrations during times of acute political crisis.
144
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Ultimately, to depict parliament as a woman was, first and foremost, to
bring attention to the masculine failings of its MPs by criticizing their ability to
act and govern in decisive, rational ways. To depict parliament as a promiscuous
woman constantly seeking sexual satisfaction outside “her” allegorical marriage
to the king was to level the charge of whore against her, making her disorderly,
problematically public, and transgressive. As Turner argues in Libertines and
Radicals, the mid-seventeenth century “whore” operates as a cultural idea
“confronted (and constituted)” by a set of “ritualized insults” which make the
whore “at once definitely low and fluidly unclassifiable… leaky in every sense,
unruly because outside the marital or parental control of one man, ribald, coarse,
lacking the restrains required by the increasingly self-conscious Civilizing
Process, loose-mouthed as well as open flapped,” and so on.122 “Whore is a
fighting word,” Turner writes, “a cutting remark,” and although he specifies that it
cuts through “the exterior shell of honour and good fame that every citizen needed
to maintain her social standing,” he also refers quite literally to the practice of
slashing the faces of accused whores and prostitutes.123 For Turner the graphic
marking of “whores” functions as the root of all pornographia, as pornography in
the modern sense seeks to “pry open or cut into” a woman’s “respectable exterior,
to reveal the expected story of sexual exposure and conquest.”124 Thus, to call
parliament a whore was more than an allegorical or political critique; it was a
145
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
means of conjuring a figurative body for an immaterial institution so that that
body might be shamed, punished, and otherwise disciplined.
Conclusion
The sexualized female persona in satirical 1640s pamphlets does not
reflect women’s or men’s reactions to the political crises of the 1640s. Other
avenues, like petitions, pamphlets, newsbooks, and letters were available for those
with opinions to express. Instead, these satirical works adopt pseudo-female
perspectives that defy credulity in their outspoken wantonness, inviting the reader
to read them as parodies of female texts and/or as grotesque drag performances of
feminine behaviour. Porno-political discourse certainly engaged with the political
issues of its immediate context, but as I have demonstrated throughout this
chapter the pseudonymous female persona served as a site onto which authors
could displace their frustrations with the current male elite without challenging
patriarchal institutions like parliament, the monarchy, and the heterosexual,
monogamous family. If the Civil Wars debased the militaristic ideal of
masculinity through the unprecedented scale of their violence, and challenged the
civic ideal of masculinity by exposing the ineffective squabbling of its political
leaders, the ideal of the male head of his own household remained as the symbolic
refuge of patriarchal privilege. After 1649, in the years leading up to the
146
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Protectorate, soldiers (who exerted their force against parliament to agitate for
arrears and religious reform) and MPs (who were refusing to disband parliament
and call new elections) seemed increasingly corrupt and threatening. The male
householder’s responsibilities – to maintain order in his domain, protect his
dependents, and impregnate his wife – proved to be a far more manageable means
of communicating, maintaining, and reinforcing patriarchal hierarchy in the midst
of radical political reform. The chaotic landscapes of porno-political fantasy, from
non-existent libertine pasts, to present sexual wastelands, to polyandrous futures,
all attempt to re-envision the interrupted Caroline period in ways which maximize
antisocial (that is to say non-marital and non-procreative) sexual pleasure. As
porno-political discourse, however, these antisocial fantasies are in constant
tension with their pro-social antithesis, which is the preservation of the sexual and
political status quo through the patriarchal institution of marriage. The sexualized
female persona, who comes to embody radical political reform in most of the texts
I have explored in this chapter, encourages readers to reject that political reform
as ultimately antisocial and to choose a return to marriage and patriarchal
hierarchy instead. As Jennifer Drouin argues, drag performances, although they
flout gender norms, are not necessarily as subversive as passing when their gender
transgression takes place within a proscribed time and space.125 The parodic
nature of the female personae and institutions I explored in this chapter exist, like
drag, in a festive, fantasy-laden context that allows them to critique their social
147
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
landscape and explore alternatives without seriously committing to any kind of
permanent reform.
Although porno-political discourse tends, thus, to be royalist and socially
conservative, it can be unexpectedly radical too at times in its willingness to
attack the manhood of the parliamentarian male elite. The lustful mock
petitioners, Mrs. Parliament, and the parliament of ladies may have been intended
to shock and horrify readers at the prospect of a total collapse of patriarchal
hierarchy, but as extrapolated fantasies of a world devoid of safe, authoritative
patriarchal figures they nevertheless imagine radical alternatives to patriarchal
hierarchy which enable at least a measure of critique of that patriarchal system.
Notes
1
Vaught, Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature, 7.
Ibid, 8.
3
Ibid.
4
Purkiss, Literature, Gender, and Politics During the English Civil War, 1.
5
See Wiseman, “‘Adam, the Father of All Flesh’: Porno-Political Rhetoric and
Political Theory in and After the English Civil War.” For more recent analyses of
pornography as an early modern discourse, see the introductions of Ian Frederick
Moulton's Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England and
Sarah Toulalan, Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth-Century
England. Pornography, Moulton and Toulalan demonstrate, was not a distinct
genre before the eighteenth-century and explicit representations of sexuality
existed most commonly alongside content we would associate with other genres
like political satire. In writing about seventeenth-century texts, then, the hybridity
of the term “porno-political” serves as a key reminder that the pamphlets I analyze
could be both erotically affecting and politically rousing.
2
148
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
6
The extent to which individual subjects at all levels of society felt invested in
divine right rule cannot be accurately gauged, since to challenge the divinely
appointed status of the king publicly would have attracted grave consequences.
Clues to enduring investment in the idea of the king’s divine status, however,
appear in parliament’s insistence up until the Second Civil War that the king’s
councillors bear all responsibility for the king’s unpopular decisions, a stance
which maintains the king’s perfection and attributes his corruption to the lower
men who surround him. Parliament’s initial demands were that the king’s power
be limited but that the political hierarchy itself remain largely unchanged.
7
Several taxonomies compete to define the 1638-52 period, the drawbacks of
which are a frequent source of debate among historians who find that the term
“English Civil War” oversimplifies an uneven decade of hostilities and peace
negotiations that extended well beyond England and into Ireland, Scotland, and
Wales. For the purposes of this chapter, which focuses on texts published in
London in the early 1640s and 1648 respectively, I have opted to define the period
in terms of a First Civil War (which began in the summer of 1642 with the first
violent clash between the king and the fleet at Hull, after years of rising hostility
between the king and the parliament) and a Second Civil War (which began in
December of 1647 when the peace negotiations that followed the King’s surrender
at the end of the First Civil War stalled and the King renewed his royalist force
with Scottish backing).
8
See Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality,
Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630-1685, 78. Turner does read pornographic
satire of the 1640s-1680s more generally as “a deliberate attempt to confront and
neutralize women’s efforts to establish their own institutions – an attempt that
frequently unravels, either by paying an unintended tribute to women’s
achievement, or by feminizing the norms that supposedly serve as a touchstone”
(xiii).
9
Wayne, 236.
10
Ibid, 237.
11
Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior Women: Varieties of Feminism in
Seventeenth-Century Drama, 213.
12
Ibid, 215.
13
MacInnes, The British Revolution, 1629-1660, 75.
14
As Braddick notes, “Doing without Parliament was not in itself a violation of
constitutional principle. The institution had no continuous existence, but was an
assembly called at the royal will for a particular purpose …. Parliaments could
provide money (only parliaments could grant taxation) and legislation. They
might also offer counsel on the basis of wide knowledge of the affairs of the
kingdom, and give voice to the grievances of the subjects, asking for redress from
149
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
the monarch.” See God’s Fury England's Fire, 56.
Ng, 17.
16
Although members of parliament were elected, parliament was by design not
economically or socially representative of the English population as a whole. The
electorate was expanding in the 1640s, as the minimum property requirement
became more attainable, but Braddick estimates that perhaps “only one in three
adult males had the right to vote in 1640” (56).
17
See Kyle, “Prince Charles in the Parliaments of 1621 and 1624.” As Kyle
writes, Charles had by his ascension “become an experienced parliament-man”
and had “promoted some of the more important bills in the period,” but had also
used parliament “as his own forum to achieve his personal aims. In essence, in
manipulating parliament on a variety of levels – elections, legislation, grand
political designs, and in the removal of those opposed to his policies – Charles
had shown the highest court in the land little respect. He treated it simply as an
instrument of his own ‘personal rule’ and perhaps therein set the pattern for the
later 1620s” (621).
18
See Young, “Charles I and the Erosion of Trust, 1625-1628.”
19
Ultimately Charles abandoned negotiations with both sides in favour of striking
at parliament again with the backing of the Scottish army and triggering the
Second Civil War.
20
Purkiss, Literature, Gender, and Politics, 136.
21
Ibid, 132-3.
22
Turner’s books Libertines and Radicals and Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature
and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England 1534-1685 devote
considerable attention to gender and sexuality in libertine culture.
23
Skerpan, The Rhetoric of Politics in the English Revolution 1642-1660, 38.
24
Ibid.
25
Ibid, 39. The rump parliament was formed after Colonel Pride’s Purge in
December of 1648. Soldiers forcibly prevented MPs of the Presbyterian faction
from taking their seats in the house, putting the Independent, Army-backed
faction in control.
26
Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England, 70.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
29
I borrow this term from Mihoko Suzuki’s Subordinate Subjects.
30
See Katharine Gillespie's Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century:
English Women Writers and the Public Sphere and Phyllis Mack's Visionary
Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England.
31
See Marcus Nevitt's Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary
England, esp p.5.
15
150
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
32
Turner, Libertines and Radicals, 39.
Ibid. An account of staff breaking appears in a 1642 newsbook, Divrnall
Occvrrences, Or, the Heads of the Proceedings in both Houses of Parliament. See
Raymond, Making the News: An Anthology of the Newsbooks of Revolutionary
England: 1641-1660, 43.
34
Raymond, 133. Raymond cites Mercurius Civicus 11, 3-11 August, 1643 in
Making the News.
35
As Raymond writes in The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks
1641-1649, newsbooks developed “relatively explicit political allegiances” within
the first years of their existence (1641-2) and although they “retain[ed]
pretensions to the language of objectivity” in the early years of the First Civil
War, sectarianism and sensationalism increased once newsbooks began to
compete with one another for increased market share (25).
36
Turner, Libertines and Radicals, 20.
37
Ibid, xiii.
38
In general, we can reliably distinguish genuine petitions from mock petitions
based on the presence of publication information in the former, but we cannot
reliably know the gender of the authors of either genre. The question of how
female petitions were written and whether such petitions were collaborative has
yet to be studied in depth, but Andrea Button argues that royalist women
petitioning parliament individually for the pardon of their husbands or for their
subsistence as widows may have relied on royalist, Anglican clergy members as
advisors, editors, and perhaps ghostwriters. See Button, “Royalist Women
Petitioners in South-West England.”
39
Early English Books Online dates the pamphlet to 1642, the date printed on the
title page, but an annotation next to the printer’s date reads 1641 rather than 1642
and the ‘2’ in the printer’s date has been crossed out. The annotation may be
Thomason’s, as this is one of the many ephemeral pamphlets in his expansive
collection.
40
Anon, “The Humble Petition of Many Hundreds of Distressed Women,
Tradesmens Wives, and Widdowes,” 10.
41
Critics debate whether the rhetoric of obligation and reluctance female
petitioners use is a ritualized trope, is designed to legitimize a petition by making
its petitioners seem less transgressive, or reflects women’s acceptance of their
subordinate position. I support Suzuki’s claim that “while scholars largely focus
on the rhetoric of the petitions, arguing that women still accepted their
subordinate status as wives, I will suggest that ... the women’s use of the form of
the petition in making and publishing their demands as subalterns belies their
rhetoric of deference and indicates that they did not necessarily acquiesce to the
position of wives included in the political person of their husbands,” Subordinate
33
151
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Subjects, 145.
42
“The Humble Petition of Divers Well-affected Women,” 10.
43
The war in question is not the First Civil War but the Irish Rebellion which
began when Ireland’s Catholic gentry organized an uprising against Protestant
settlers in Ireland.
44
Smith, Suzuki, and Wiseman, “A True Copie of the Petition of the
Gentlewomen, and Tradesmens-wives in and about the City of London,” 13.
45
Ibid, 14.
46
Ibid.
47
Ibid, 15.
48
Ibid, 16.
49
These words are italicized in the original so as to distinguish them as narration.
I have un-italicized them here.
50
Smith, Suzuki, and Wiseman, 16.
51
Ibid.
52
Nevitt, 166.
53
Braddick, 125-7. As Braddick notes, Pym in the early years of the long
parliament “was a significant but not quite dominant figure…. His views were
compelling, but not universally held,” 126.
54
Petitions by Leveller women in particular show that women’s claims to political
agency intensified over the 1640s. In “The Humble Petition of Divers Wellaffected Women,” the petitioners ask the House of Commons “can you imagine us
to be so sottish or stupid, as not to perceive, nor to be sencible when dayly those
strong defences of our Peace and welfare are broken down,” and “[w]ould you
have us keep at home in our houses when men of such faithfulness and integrity…
are fetcht out of their beds and forced from their Houses by Souldiers?” (36).
55
Nevitt, 167.
56
Wall, The Imprint of Gender, 251.
57
Ibid.
58
For convenience, and lacking any information concerning the authorship of The
Virgin’s Complaint, I will from this point forward refer to “the virgins” as the
speaker/authors of the pamphlet although male authorship seems likely.
59
Anon., The Virgins Complaint, 2.
60
Ibid, 2-3.
61
Ibid, 4.
62
Ibid.
63
These words appear in the full title of the pamphlet: The Virgins Complaint for
the loss of their Sweet-Hearts by these Present Wars, And their owne long
solitude, and keeping their Virginities against their Wills.
64
Ibid, 3.
152
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
65
Ibid, 5.
Ibid. A version of this argument also appears in a 1642 mock petition, The
Humble Petition of many Thousands of Wives and Matrons of the City of London.
67
Ibid.
68
Ibid, 8.
69
Ibid.
70
Anon., The Resolution of the Women of London to Parliament, A2r.
71
Anon, The Mid-wives just petition, A2v.
72
Stradling et al., The City-Dames Petition in The behalfe of the long afflicted, but
well-affected Cavaliers, 4.
73
I refer to the city-dames as the authors for the sake of convenience, since the
authors are unknown, but note that the “city-dames” of the pamphlet likely do not
represent the perspective or experiences of women living in London in 1647.
74
Stradling et al. get at this point through a series of trenchant rhetorical
questions, demonstrating that while much of this mock petition works to entertain
its readers with sexual situations and sexual puns, mock petitions are
simultaneously serious engagements with the political culture of their day.
Stradling et al. write that “in justice we ought to have our desires answered in
some measure, for who paid for the Scots (those beggarly Saints) after they were
invited to begin this warre, but the City? Who continued this warre but the City?
Or who are like to be undone by this war but the City?” The City-Dames Petition,
2. The claims the pamphlet makes about London’s importance are not overstated
and the authors’ frustrations at parliament’s failure to bring the conflict to a
resolution are palpable.
75
Ibid.
76
Ibid.
77
Ibid.
78
Ibid.
79
Ibid.
80
Anon., The Humble Petition of Many Thousands of Wives and Matrons of the
City of London, A2r-v.Thomason dates this pamphlet ‘Feb 4 1642’, although the
printer dates it 1643.
81
Ibid, A2v.
82
Ibid.
83
Ibid, A3r.
84
Ibid.
85
Ibid, A3v.
86
Ibid, A3r-v.
87
Ibid, A4r.
88
Ibid.
66
153
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
89
Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, 2.
Ibid, 146.
91
The Leveller movement was very influential in London and within the New
Model Army in 1648, and successfully pressured the Independent faction of
parliament to break from the presbyterian faction within parliament and negotiate
separately with Charles I in the aftermath of the second Civil War. Levellers
sought to make both the king and parliament more accountable to the people of
London and advocated for religious tolerance.
92
Variations on this pamphlet were published in 1647, including an anonymous,
undated pamphlet entitled An Exact Diurnall of the Parliament of Ladyes which
parodies a newsbook format. The pamphlet I examine in depth is Henry Neville’s,
which models its plot on Aristophanes’s comedy, Assemblywomen.
93
I use Thomason’s annotations to date these pamphlets.
94
qtd in Kennedy, The English Revolution 1642-1649, 99.
95
Bennett, The Civil Wars in Britain and Ireland 1638-1651, 299.
96
Kennedy, 105.
97
Melancholicus [pseud.], Mistris Parliament Brought to Bed of a Monstrous
Childe of Reformation, 4. The Mistris Parliament series was published under the
pseudonym Mercurius Melancholicus. John Crouch and John Hakluyt both wrote
newsbooks and pamphlets under the pseudonym ‘Mercurius Melancholicus’, but
Crouch is believed to have written the Mistris Parliament series. Crouch was a
Smithfield bookseller and writer who wrote multiple anti-puritan satires and
royalist newsbooks. The name Mercurius Melancholicus parodies the titles of the
more legitimate newsbooks, Mercurius Britanicus and Mercurius Civicus.
98
Ibid, 5.
99
Ibid.
100
Purkiss, Literature, Gender, and Politics, 182.
101
Melancholicus [pseud.], Mistris Parliament Brought to Bed, 5.
102
Ibid, 4.
103
Purkiss, Literature, Gender, and Politics, 182.
104
Melancholicus [pseud.], Mistris Parliament Brought to Bed, 8.
105
Purkiss, Literature, Gender, and Politics, 182-3.
106
Neville, A Parliament of Ladies, A2r.
107
Ibid.
108
Ibid.
109
Ibid.
110
Ibid, A2v.
111
Ibid.
112
Ibid.
113
Ibid, A4r.
90
154
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
114
Ibid.
Ibid, B1r.
116
Ibid, B1v.
117
Ibid, B2v.
118
Ibid.
119
Ibid.
120
Ibid, B2v-B3r.
121
Ibid, B4v.
122
Turner, Libertines and Radicals, 9.
123
Ibid, 5. Women designated as “whores” might also suffer “showers of filth,
insulting graffiti, broken windows, mass assault, and rape” (24). See also pp. 2437.
124
Ibid, 1.
125
Drouin remarks specifically on the distinctions between drag and passing with
regards to context and space, writing that "[p]assing, a street practice that does not
benefit from the contextual protection afforded to theatrical cross-dressing (and
even, but to a lesser extent, cabaret drag) is constantly subjected to the policing
gaze of surveillance and to discipline if that gaze penetrates the illusion.” The lack
of protection often occasions violence, Drouin argues, but the violence is
indicative of the contexts in which gender subversion will and will not be
tolerated. See Drouin, “Cross-Dressing, Drag, and Passing: Slippages in
Shakespearean Comedy,” 3-4.
115
155
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Chapter Three: Politics of Female Impersonation in the
Interregnum Almanacs of Sarah Jinner and Sarah Ginnor
Having studied the ways male characters and authors assumed female
disguises and pseudonymous female personae in the earlier decades of the
seventeenth century, I turn in this chapter to Sarah Jinner, recognized as the first
female almanac compiler, and her impersonator, Sarah Ginnor. In Chapter One I
discussed the benefits of adopting a disorderly, Amazonian persona for male
characters like Lorenzo, Epicoene, and Dauphine as a means to reform a
disordered patriarchal order. In Chapter Two I proposed that pseudonymous
authors likewise found sexualized female personae expedient as a means of
shaming patriarchal institutions like parliament and reinforcing the male head of
household as the primary figure of patriarchal authority and integrity. This final
chapter builds on the previous two by exploring whether women themselves were
able to use sexualized personae as tools for patriarchal critique. Were women able
to use representations of disorderly female sexuality to critique the failings of a
flawed patriarchal system? Or did such female personae only prove effective
when their parodic, sexualized, or otherwise-excessive transgressions made it
clear to readers that such personae were fictional projections of the authors? In
other words, did female personae only work as vehicles for critique when these
157
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
figures somehow failed to pass as women and slipped into a kind of authorial drag
recognizable to the reader?
To understand the dynamics of female impersonation, drag, and passing as
they pertain to gendered authorship, this chapter studies two examples of a
sexualized female persona – one created by the author of Sarah Jinner’s 1657-64
almanacs (accepted by critics as female-authored) and one created by the author
of Sarah Ginnor’s mock almanac (accepted by critics as male-authored). Based on
the burlesque, parodic humour of Ginnor’s almanac, critics often perceive this text
as an attack on female authorship and female authors as hyper-sexualized and
trivial. But since the hyper-sexualization of pseudonymous female personae in
Civil War print provides a surprising amount of political commentary when read
closely, the assumption that the hyper-sexualization of female authorship
automatically constitutes an attack on female-authored texts as inconsequential
bears further investigation. Looking at the ways the four almanacs published
under Sarah Jinner’s name between 1658 and 1664 combine seditious republican
political predictions with sexually explicit predictions of venery, I propose that
the Jinner author and her1 publishers embraced the sexualized female personae of
Civil War print for their marketability and potential to legitimize political critique
against tyrannous political hierarchies like the Protectorate regime in its final
years, constructing a new female persona in their likeness. While the Ginnor
author does strive to trivialize Jinner, I will argue that it is Jinner’s political
content that the mock almanac reacts most strongly to, not Jinner’s status as a
158
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
female author or her text’s use of explicit sexual content. As case studies in
female impersonation, Jinner and Ginnor provide opportunities to explore
questions of gendered authorship, reception, and genre expectation, and to
consider how critics’ approaches to these questions have changed over time. Since
we possess no solid facts about either Jinner or Ginnor beyond what the texts
themselves can tell us, we as critics can only speculate about the sex of either
author. Such speculation invites reflection on the criteria we use to make
determinations about an author’s sex, and how such determinations affect how we
as modern readers receive and write about a text.
After decades of women’s contributions to the early modern publishing
industry having been ignored, the references to Jinner and other female almanac
compilers which began in Bernard Capp’s landmark study of early modern
almanacs, Astrology and the Popular Press (1979), brought Jinner’s almanacs to
scholars’ attention. Since Capp’s work, other almanac scholars like Alan S.
Weber, Louise Hill Curth, Adam Smyth, and Timothy Feist have studied
seventeenth-century women’s roles in writing, printing, and annotating almanacs.
Acknowledging that Jinner’s authorship is uncertain, and noting that Capp’s
evidence is slight, these critics nevertheless cite Capp to defend the Jinner author
as the first female almanac compiler.2 I do not wish to assert that the Jinner author
was male, but the evidence neither supports nor denies assertions about Jinner’s
sex. The notion that Jinner’s almanac was authored from start to finish by one
woman, as I will demonstrate in the next section, supports modern ideas about
159
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
gendered authorship that clash with the practices of mid-seventeenth-century
almanac production. With no data on the Jinner and Ginnor authors besides that
created in their texts, and given that almanacs as a genre invested considerably in
creating marketable authorial personae that only sometimes represented the
identities of their authors, the only compelling reason to assume that the Jinner
author is female and that the Ginnor author is male rests on essentialist
assumptions that men write a certain way while women write another: that, for
instance, men write pornography while women write gynaecological reference
materials, or that men use gender satire and sexual humour while women write in
consistently serious and sincere tones. While scholars of Jinner strive to elevate
Jinner’s works from obscurity by emphasizing how ground-breaking her almanacs
were, the assumptions that inform the distinctions critics make between “Sarah
Jinner” the first female almanac compiler and “Sarah Ginnor” the harassing male
impersonator need evaluating as work on Jinner’s almanacs and other ephemeral
women’s writing moves forward.
This chapter interrogates the construction of female authorship by
comparing Jinner’s almanacs, which “pass” to critics as female-authored, to the
pseudonymous Ginnor almanac, whose burlesque tone leads critics to identify it
as a male-authored parody – a drag performance, in other words. The first section
of this chapter establishes the contextual details of authorship and production in
the almanac market of the late 1650s and evaluates the existing evidence
concerning the Jinner author. The second section examines recent modern critical
160
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
distinctions between the Jinner and Ginnor personae that connect the presumed
gender of each author to the presence or absence of sexually explicit humour and
gender satire in their respective works. I argue that on the topic of sexuality these
two female personae have more in common than critics usually recognize, despite
a few subtle differences in how each persona frames the legitimacy of female
authorship. Finally, I will demonstrate in the final section of this chapter that the
important distinctions to be made between Jinner and Ginnor concern not the
issue of sexuality, which is where critics typically divide them, but the issue of
politics. In this section I explore the ways in which Jinner uses sexual discourse to
critique Cromwell’s Protectorate in its final years, and demonstrate that it is not
by bringing up sexuality but by decoupling sexuality from politics that Ginnor
attempts and fails to neutralize Jinner.
Identifying “Sarah Jinner” in the Almanac Market of the 1650s
Almanacs were produced and sold in seventeenth-century England in
massive quantities. “In the 1660s, for which detailed evidence survives,” Capp
writes, “sales averaged about 400,000 copies annually, a figure which suggests
that roughly one family in three bought an almanac each year.”3 Despite the
ubiquity of the genre, very little has been written about early modern almanacs.
The ephemeral nature of almanacs means that they have not survived in great
numbers – they were designed for everyday use and in most cases were discarded
161
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
once they were no longer current. Their popularity, however, allows us to get a
fuller picture of the shared beliefs, perspectives, and opinions people shared
across a range of backgrounds. Jinner’s almanacs, as I will demonstrate, cross
genres, borrow from established traditions, construct authorship, and manage
reader expectations in ways specific to the conditions of almanac production in
the 1650s. To analyze Jinner’s authorship and Ginnor’s response I must therefore
briefly situate both almanacs in the contexts of their publication.
As Capp writes, almanacs were successful “because [they] filled a wide
variety of roles, cheaply and concisely,” serving not only as calendars but as gifts,
farming advice, and home reference texts on subjects as diverse as history,
husbandry, politics, and medicine.4 Early modern almanacs at their most basic
functioned as calendars for an upcoming year, and ranged from single page
“sheet” almanacs “commonly seen [posted] on screens and doors” in Elizabethan
England to octavo-sized “book” almanacs which were usually two or more full
sheets long.5 Early modern almanacs also served (as modern calendars and day
planners do) as places in which to keep track of important dates and records,
especially since almanacs were a source of note paper in an age when paper was a
costly commodity. Readers could have their almanacs bound with blank pages on
which they could keep accounts, notes, and diaries, and might even buy almanacs
that came already bound with blanks, but they might also use the marginal spaces
of the almanacs they purchased for note keeping, making almanacs very personal
and interactive texts.6 Sarah Jinner’s almanacs are all book length and contain
162
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
lengthy prose predictions and lists of medical recipes in addition to the ephemeris
tables found in all book length almanacs. Book almanacs typically began with a
preface to the reader followed by a semi-standardized calendar of the upcoming
year consisting of twelve ephemeris tables that listed the days of each month in
connection with the future positions of the sun, moon, and planets. The ephemeris
tables varied from almanac to almanac, but most enabled readers to track the days
of a given month with their corresponding days of the week, moveable feasts and
saint’s days, as well as upcoming solstices, lunar cycles, expected weather
conditions, and sometimes predictions about local or world events (space
permitting). Beyond the ephemeris tables, contents varied from almanac to
almanac but often included a section of prognostications and a section of
supplementary reference materials focused on the needs and interests of the
compiler’s ideal readers.
Understanding the regular contents and conventions of seventeenthcentury almanacs allows us to quickly identify Ginnor’s 1659 The Womans
Almanack as a fraud. Ginnor’s almanac bears a convincing title and title page,
although the Ginnor woodcut image is far cruder than the engraving that appears
on Jinner’s almanac. The woodcut had also appeared twice before on scurrilous
pamphlets and was perhaps recognizable to readers who’d read those pamphlets
before.7 But even if readers were fooled by the title page, Ginnor’s almanac would
have been a full sheet too short of the minimum two sheet length of a book
almanac to trick anyone who picked it up off the shelf into thinking it was Jinner’s
163
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
almanac. Although Ginnor’s preface somewhat convincingly passes for that of an
almanac, readers would have noticed immediately that the twelve ephemeris
tables – the most crucial and defining aspect of any almanac – were missing from
Ginnor’s slim volume. Those who purchased this almanac thus likely did so
recognizing that it belonged to the genre of “burlesque” almanacs Capp traces
back to 1591, which attacked the vaguely-worded prognostications of judicial
astrologers by providing mock predictions laden with platitudes.8 Despite the
hostility of burlesque almanacs towards astrology, the Poor Robin series of mock
almanacs, which began in 1664 and ran well into the eighteenth century with the
Stationers’ Company’s approval, demonstrates that there was a steady market for
mock almanacs as well as for real ones (partially, Capp supposes, because the
Poor Robin series did provide the useful ephemeris tables a reader could find in
legitimate almanacs).
Burlesque almanacs like Ginnor’s and others attacked the lengthy prose
predictions called “prognostications” that detailed events of political, religious,
and social significance in the coming year. Satirists mocked prognostications for
their conventional platitudes and lack of specificity, but vague phrasings were in
part an adaptation to shifting standards of almanac censorship in the seventeenth
century. Almanacs and astrology writing had a long history of political
involvement and censorship before the seventeenth century, as prognostications
tended to hint at (and sometimes blatantly project) social unrest, war, and the
downfalls, illnesses, and deaths of important figures of state.9 In a bid to exert
164
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
some control over the political content of almanacs, King James I in 1603 granted
the Stationers’ Company a monopoly over almanac production that lasted until the
eighteenth century (profits from almanacs, as well as primers and psalters, went to
the English Stock, a corporation founded to support the poorer members of the
guild but which produced large profits for members who owned shares of it).10
The burden of censorship thereafter fell largely on the Stationers’ Company,
which was “legally liable for almanac content that ran afoul of the government”
and thus protected its privileges by appointing licensers of their own to select and
approve only almanacs which contained prognostications that adhered to
mainstream religious and political views or were couched in obscure and vague
phrasings.11 As the Civil Wars demolished any notion of a unified “mainstream”
and dismantled the Star Chamber responsible for enforcing English censorship
laws, almanacs of the 1640s became as vehemently partisan as the newsbooks of
the same period.12 “Though a degree of governmental control was gradually
restored,” Capp writes, under the Protectorate and Restoration governments
“political speculation remained an important feature in the more popular almanacs
throughout their later history.”13
Almanacs published in the 1650s were generally favourable towards the
Cromwellian regime and promoted social order (selected and edited as they were
by licenser John Booker, who supported the parliamentarian cause in the 1640s).
Sarah Jinner’s critique of the Protectorate and her projections of civil unrest stand
out, by contrast, as quite radical for the political climate of 1657, although they
165
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
are neither as specifically worded nor as extreme as Lilly’s or Booker’s 1640s
predictions. Given the politically conservative tone of most late 1650s almanacs,
Ginnor’s burlesque response to Jinner might plausibly constitute an attempt to
defuse Jinner’s political radicalism as much as it constitutes an admonishment to
female authors (an argument that I will explore in further depth in the third
section of this chapter).
While most almanacs including Jinner’s comprise three main elements –
calendars, prognostications, and husbandry advice – almanacs also included
specialized reference materials their readers might find useful. The specific
collection of reference materials presented often provides a sense of the kind of
ideal readership an author hoped to attract. While most almanacs including
Jinner’s included monthly husbandry advice on when to plant crops, geld
livestock, or harvest specific plants, as well as guidelines on when it was safe to
“take physic” or have one’s blood let (believed to be dangerous in the summer
months especially), Jinner’s almanac specialized in reproductive medicine as well
and included pages of recipes designed to assist women through every step of
childbearing, from conception to lactation. Jinner also provided multiple recipes
which contained known abortifacients like pennyroyal and mugwort, as well as
anaphrodisiacs for men and women to help them resist sexual desires in times
when couplings were not astrologically prudent.14 Although Jinner’s preface and
prognostication make no attempt to exclude a male readership, the recipes
predominantly target gynaecological and obstetric issues, suggesting that the
166
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Jinner author did envision a female readership. Jinner’s almanac may have
appealed to a readership of rural medical practitioners unable to afford the larger
medical reference texts, however. Illustrations of the “zodiacal man,” an
astrologically labelled anatomy of a human body, appear in Jinner’s almanac.
Capp asserts that images of the zodiacal man were in constant demand despite
their crudeness because they were “probably the only work of reference available
to a vast number of unqualified physicians” in English villages far from urban
centres.15 Jinner’s predictions might have proved similarly useful to women
caring for others in a domestic setting or to practitioners caring for others more
professionally. The practical information almanacs provided attracted readers
priced out of the market for larger reference works, and by specializing in a
particular kind of reference material – reproductive medicine in Jinner’s case –
almanac compilers and their printers could differentiate themselves from the other
almanacs on the market in a given year and compete by capturing a niche section
of the market.
The licensers the Stationers’ Company appointed to oversee the English
Stock chose to authorize for publication only a select few of the numerous
almanacs submitted to them annually; in this way the Company tightly controlled
competition and maximized profits.16 Since ephemeris tables did not vary greatly
between almanacs, almanacs went after niche markets by tailoring their
predictions and supplementary materials to appeal to certain specific groups, but
they also used titles, authorial personae, and other indicators to attract the specific
167
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
kinds of readers they were targeting with their specialized content. “Although the
term marketing did not exist in the seventeenth century,” Curth writes, “I believe
the Stationers’ Company approached the production of almanacs through a similar
decision-making process. It is clear that different titles were written to appeal to
readers with varying levels of literacy, wealth, and sophistication, and although
most almanacs were printed in London, many targeted specific regional audiences
from Dover to Durham.”17
To Curth’s comments I would add that among the marketing tools
available to the Company in the seventeenth century, authorial personae stand out
as the driving force in creating a brand and loyal customer base. Many
seventeenth-century almanacs marketed themselves on the personal reputation
and fame of their astrologers, but once those astrologers died the Stationers’
Company was much more likely to hire an anonymous compiler to continue the
series under the dead astrologer’s name than to launch a new series of almanacs
under the new compiler’s name. Other almanacs, like the Fly series and the Poor
Robin series, operated under pseudonymous authorial personae handed down over
the course of decades so that, as Feist writes, in 1712 “Richard Saunders, the
deceased human being, competed for shillings side-by-side with Poor Robin, the
fictional character.”18As Feist concludes, “for early modern almanacs, the
author’s name functioned as a brand name, not a source attribution,” and
“customers gravitated to a given brand name because it signified content, not
authorship.”19
168
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
We can expect then that even though Jinner never achieved the level of
brand name recognition a long-running almanac series maintained, the Company
may have chosen the Jinner author because her female authorial persona
(signalled by her name and the prominent engraving of a young woman on the
cover of her almanac) could signal to an audience that she had specific and
interesting expertise to offer as a woman. We might also conversely conclude,
however, that given the Company’s focus on developing almanac series as brands
based on specific and sometimes fictional or pseudonymous authorial names,
“Sarah Jinner” might best be thought of as a constructed authorial persona
designed to sell as many almanacs as possible rather than a female astrologer
providing us a female perspective on life in the 1650s.
Beyond Jinner’s almanacs, scholars have uncovered only a single
reference to a “Sarah Gunner” as a practicing astrologer. The reference occurs in
the [1690s] memoir of Henry Herbert, a soldier who mentions “Sara Gunner” in
the context of a farcical anecdote Herbert recounts to embarrass his commanding
officer. Herbert tells numerous stories about how this officer callously avoids all
situations in which he might be wounded or killed, and names Jinner as a prop in
a joke about the officer’s gullibility and self-importance. Herbert muses that “if
Sanders or Sara Gunner have cast [the commanding officer’s] nativity water and
foretold that he should be great with great men, why should [he] flatter and fawne
upon all great men and kisse their arses if the fates decree him to be soe? What
reason is there that a person of that extraordinary hopes should, like on[e] of the
169
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
common people, expose himself to more than ordinary hazards?”20 The name
Sanders presumably refers to Richard Saunders, a practicing astrologist and
almanac compiler of the late seventeenth century. Based on this reference to
Gunner/Jinner in connection with Saunders, Capp has argued that Jinner was in
fact a practicing astrologer in the 1670s (nearly two decades after her almanacs
were published). Lacking other evidence, most critics have supported Capp’s
assertion. Looking at the humorous and irreverent context in which the name
appears, however, and taking into account that the reference is not actually an
anecdote or an encounter with Jinner but rather a hyperbolic joke that mocks
narcissists like the commanding officer who put undue stock in the favourable
things astrologers tell them about themselves, we may think it overly hasty to
accept Herbert’s text as evidence that Sarah Jinner was a practicing astrologer.
The fact that Jinner/Gunner’s name appears alongside Saunders’s name lends the
reference some credibility, but given the context, it seems possible that Herbert
names Gunner/Jinner in order to enhance his joke by referring to an astrologer
readers already had a hard time taking seriously. The joke may be that the
hypocritical commanding officer proves himself to be foolish by trusting the
predictions of astrologers, who are well-known charlatans as a group, and doubly
foolish trusting Saunders and Jinner/Gunner in particular. Given the spelling of
“Gunner” and the context of Herbert’s joke, Herbert might as plausibly be
referring to “Ginnor,” the author of the mock almanac, whose parodic and
trivializing imitation of Jinner’s astrological predictions complements Herbert’s
170
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
disdain for judicial astrology. While Herbert’s text certainly does not disprove
assertions that the Jinner author was a practicing female astrologer, Herbert’s joke
is not a very solid foundation on which to rest such assertions either.
Capp’s arguments that Jinner “may have been a woman of independent
means, publishing simply for personal satisfaction,” and that she “was more
probably a medical practitioner,” however, are much easier to credit based on the
information available about the early modern almanac market.21 Capp reasons that
since “most almanac compilers received only a pittance for their copy,” and so
many compilers went to the effort of compiling almanacs because “such
publications were a very effective means of publicizing their professional
services,” the odds that Jinner might also have been a medical practitioner of
some sort are high.22 Jinner’s medical knowledge may have come from her
experience, but it might also have come from a familiarity with gynaecological
and obstetrical manuals which towards the second half of the seventeenth century
were increasingly available to the public in vernacular translation. Jinner
recommends in 1659 that her readers purchase The Secret Miracles of Nature
(1658) and The Woman’s Counsellor (1657), both of which are translations
produced by her publisher, John Streater, and Weber notes that some of the
medical recipes Jinner includes in her almanac are taken verbatim from The
Woman’s Counsellor. Weber concludes along with Capp that Jinner was a
medical practitioner, “working firmly within a learned and written tradition of
medicine, not a folk-herbalist or oral body of knowledge as one might expect
171
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
judging from the popular nature of the almanac."23 Although we can use
information about almanacs to build a more detailed picture about Jinner’s
background, however, none of these details tells us anything conclusive about
Jinner’s sex. As Harvey persuasively argues in Ventriloquized Voices, male
authors dominated seventeenth-century reproductive medical writing despite the
fact that most practitioners were female.24 So although the Jinner author’s choice
of topic does correspond with women’s medical issues it does not necessarily
exclude male authorship. Likewise, although women did not write on the topic of
reproductive medicine as frequently as men did, women made up the majority of
the field’s practitioners, whether serving formally as midwives or simply
preparing, sharing, and applying home remedies to the members of their
households and communities. We might also entertain the possibility that, since
the two books Jinner promotes and excerpts in her almanacs were actually
published by her printer John Streater, the almanac’s focus on reproductive
medicine came about not only due to the Jinner author’s interest or expertise in
reproductive medicine but also in part as a means to promote Streater’s more
expensive books.
I am not proposing that we treat the Jinner almanacs as pseudonymous
works, nor am I arguing that we presume male authorship of Jinner’s almanacs as
I argued in Chapter Two with reference to the pseudonymous porno-political texts
like the mock petitions which assumed parodic female personae. But I do hope to
illustrate that when and if women entered popular print genres, we have no reason
172
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
to believe that they were not just as capable of writing under calculated authorial
personae as their male counterparts were, and that modern views of a single,
identifiable authorial voice that reflects the experiences of its author clashes with
the early modern almanac genre’s specific trends and practices. Early modern
almanacs as a genre present fantasies of a single authorial voice despite many
layers of editing and collaboration between often anonymous or pseudonymous
compilers, licensers, and senior members of the Stationers’ Company.25 The fact
that we know next to nothing about the Jinner author means that we lose very
little by making her a less central focus of critical investigations. Within the
context of the almanac genre, letting the Jinner author’s identity and sex fade into
the background enables us to ask questions about female authorship that we do
have the evidence to answer. These questions focus not on Jinner as an author but
on the kind of persona the Jinner author and the Company of Stationers thought
readers were mostly likely to buy year after year.
Sexual Content and Gendered Authorship: Analyzing Scholars’ Responses to
Ginnor’s Response
As I have demonstrated in earlier chapters, female personae in popular
print were often powerfully associated with sexuality. For an almanac marketing
itself as a guide to reproductive health, this connection between female personae
and sexual topics was a strength. There was, however, a risk that a female
173
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
astrologist persona would be taken less seriously than a male astrologist persona.
Just as the connection between women and sexual topics could lend authority to
Jinner’s knowledge of reproductive medicine, the connections between female
speech and loose sexuality could open Jinner to accusations of sexual impropriety
and misconduct. Because of this connection, as I argued in my examination of
women’s petitions, female petitioners of the 1640s tended to steer clear of sexual
topics in their political writing only to have their politics turned into lust in the
parodies that followed. Although a female persona like Jinner’s would attract
readers’ attention in a crowded almanac market, that attention was not guaranteed
to be the right kind of attention. Yet so long as the attention translated into sales,
we can imagine that Streater and Jinner were willing to bear the risks. While I
have argued in previous chapters that the sexualized female personae of satirical
pamphlets were useful to male authors like Neville (author of A Parliament of
Ladies) who wished to critique patriarchal authority without compromising their
male privilege, I explore in this section of the chapter whether the presence of
explicit sexual content in a text that purports to be female-authored necessarily
signals that the work is in fact a male-authored impersonation.
Jinner and Ginnor provide us with a fascinating opportunity to explore
these questions about the assumptions surrounding sexual content and female
authorship because although in many ways Jinner’s and Ginnor’s personae
overlap with each other, critics tend to emphasize firm distinctions between the
two on the issue of sexuality. These firm distinctions often serve to establish the
174
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
pseudonymous status of Ginnor’s text, but bring with them a series of modern
critical assumptions about gendered authorship that I wish to unpack and evaluate.
Critics continue to emphasize differences between Jinner’s and Ginnor’s almanacs
because while 1658 almanac customers would likely not have mistaken Ginnor’s
short burlesque almanac for Jinner’s longer, licensed one, Ginnor’s almanac did
manage to pass as Jinner’s during the compilation of the Short Title Catalogue,
where Ginnor’s almanac is still listed as authored by Jinner.26 Critics, perhaps in
response to this persistent and problematic attribution, tend to bring up Ginnor’s
almanac only to assert its illegitimacy as a female-authored almanac. Weber, for
example, who has conducted the most extensive research on Jinner and the
handful of other female almanac compilers, emphasizes Jinner’s authenticity as a
serious female practitioner and author in order set her almanacs apart from
Ginnor’s “pornographic”27 imitation. In distinguishing Ginnor from Jinner on the
basis that Ginnor writes pornography while Jinner writes gynaecological
reference, however, Weber tends to overlook the ways Jinner herself writes
frankly and explicitly about sexuality in the prognostication section of her
almanac, ways which have little to do with the medical advice she provides in the
recipes that follow the prognostications. Distinctions between Jinner and Ginnor
on the basis that Jinner writes medically about sexuality while Ginnor writes
pornographically are even more problematic, as we will see, given that nearly all
of Ginnor’s “pornographic” content is plagiarized almost word for word from
Jinner’s 1658 almanac. Remarking on the irregularities of Jinner’s final 1664
175
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
almanac (lack of title page and lack of extensive prognostications), Curth argues
that the 1664 almanac was written by someone other than the original (female)
Jinner author and singles out the presence of recipes designed to treat male
impotence and take the edge off venery in women and men to support her
assertion that these entries “must have been written by a man.”28 Both Curth’s and
Weber’s determinations of gendered authorship equate the presence of sexual
content with male authorship and gynaecological content with female authorship,
but tend to underplay just how much sexual content the Jinner almanacs include.
Did early modern readers share modern critics’ instincts to see sexual
content as male-authored parody or did sexual content “pass” more believably,
during this period, as the product of a female pen? Much of modern critics’
discomfort with sexualized female personae like that of Jinner, I would argue, has
its roots in lingering cultural assumptions that equate women’s sexual expression
with misogynistic degradation. Because misogynist beliefs held that women were
lustful and sexually insatiable and because these beliefs resulted in women’s
wide-scale oppression, feminist critics approaching these texts are perhaps wary
of hyper-sexualizing female authors. Fears of hyper-sexualization assume,
however, that women’s connection to sexuality serves only to shame and
disempower them. Certainly in most cases sexuality was a tool of misogynistic
oppression, but as my project has attempted to demonstrate, there are rare
instances in which expressing female sexuality offers an individual the
opportunity to speak out against oppressive hierarchies and shame those in power.
176
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Jinner addresses her readers’ low expectations of female authorship in the
opening words of the preface to her first almanac with concern only that she will
not be taken seriously as an educated astrologer. “You may wonder to see one of
our sex in print, especially in the Celestial Sciences,” she begins, acknowledging
readers’ immediate skepticism with “I might urge much in my defence, yea, more
than the volume of this Book can contain.”29 The prologue is only two pages long,
but thoroughly defends women’s moral and intellectual equality with men. Much
of the defence borrows from traditional querelle des femmes defences of women
and rejects misogynistic commonplaces to argue that women have “souls as well
as men, though some witty Coxcombs strive to put us out of concert of our selves,
as if we were but imperfect pieces, and that Nature intending a man, when the
seminal conception proves weak, there issues a woman.”30 Jinner adds her own
erudite arguments, picking up on the misogyny inherent in early modern
discourses of reproduction and conception and rebutting them with her own
knowledge of Aristotle’s two-seed model of conception. As Jinner writes, since
“Aristotle affirms, that woman doth contribute to the formation matter as well as
place,” meaning she contributes seed as well as her womb to a child’s creation,
“Mankind is preserved by woman.” Jinner then makes the point that what
separates men and women is not intellectual ability but access to schooling, and
positions herself as one of the privileged few to overcome those barriers.31
Jinner’s defence not only works to unsettle a reader’s skepticism that a female
compiler might publish an almanac, it also demonstrates the author’s education
177
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
and intelligence with its savvy use of common female defence tropes and its
innovative use of Aristotle (who himself was far from a feminist) to invert
misogynistic arguments about female inferiority.
Ginnor’s preface in The Womans Almanack of 1659 also begins with a
defence of female authorship, a defence that in many ways appears more vigorous
than Jinner’s. “Courteous Reader,” Ginnor begins, “The gift of learning being so
little set by in these days amongst those of our Sex, is the chief invitation which
hath caused me to publish this final Tract, thereby to stir up others, not to let their
great worth with other learned Authors of our Sex ly in obscurity."32 Ginnor’s
defence takes up women’s lack of access to education, the exact issue Jinner
addresses in her preface, although Ginnor’s phrasing of “so little set by …
amongst our Sex” suggests perhaps that it is women’s lack of inclination towards
education that is to blame, not lack of opportunity. Ginnor also adapts distinct
phrases and key ideas from Jinner’s 1658 preface to construct her more aggressive
defence. Ginnor’s proposal to stir up others and prevent female authors from
obscurity echoes Jinner’s encouraging call of “why should we [women] suffer our
parts to rust? Let us scowre the rust off, by ingenious endeavouring the attaining
higher accomplishments.”33 Jinner, however, prudently ducks accusations that she
seeks genuine social change, clarifying in the very next sentence “This I say, not
to animate our Sex, to assume or usurp the breeches: No, but perhaps we should
shine in the splendor of vertue, it would animate our Husbands to excel us: so by
this means we should have an excellent World."34 Ginnor offers no apologies or
178
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
disclaimers to her defence of women’s equality. Since most defences of women’s
equality, especially those authored by women, included apologies or other
disclaimers, Ginnor’s unapologetically radical assertions might have signalled to
readers that she was not seriously advocating for female equality but was instead
using a pseudonymous female persona to satirize female defences by exaggerating
their arguments. Ginnor’s remarks on women’s equality in her preface emphasize
in stronger terms than Jinner’s women’s anger at being cast as inferiors (“Why
then should we suffer these Cater-pillers to eat up our vine?”). Ginnor couples this
anger with farcical threats of a female uprising (“Let me tell you, it is as lawful
for us to be Judges & plead our own Causes in our own gowns as Lawyers to
plead for others.”) Ginnor also amplifies Jinner’s cheeky comment that if wives
pursue intellectual work it will spur their husbands on to “excel” them by writing
that in taking up astrology women will “animate [their] husbands to excel
[them],” which will keep them in their wives’ “studies” when they had rather been
in an Alehouse. Ginnor adds a cryptic bit of sexual innuendo to her remarks about
husbands, writing that wives will find their lives more “comfortable” and
“pleasant” when they have their husbands in their studies and are able to make
them “sensible where the sign lies.”35 While Ginnor’s persona is an outspoken
critic of misogyny, her lack of subtlety and education, as well as her base desires
to overturn male hierarchy in order to receive more regular sex from her husband,
align her recognizably with the parodic, sexualized female voice of 1640s
political pornography.
179
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Yet although Ginnor’s persona is clearly more parodically sexual than
Jinner’s, the differences between Ginnor and Jinner remain somewhat subtle, for
although Ginnor’s excessively outspoken defence of women makes Jinner seem
conservative by comparison, Jinner herself also speaks out with references to
transgressive female exemplars. Despite the conventional nature of Jinner’s
defence, for instance, the section of the defence in which Jinner lists exemplars of
female virtue to bolster her legitimacy as a female author highlights primarily
Amazonian women. “How many Commonwealths have been managed by
women,” she asks, “as the Amazones? Did not Semiramis set the Babylonian
Kingdom in great Glory?” Amazons, as I discussed briefly in Chapter One, were
figures of contested femininity as women usurping masculine roles and masculine
clothing without passing as males. The reference to Semiramis, an Assyrian
goddess of Greek mythology who impersonated her son in order to lead his army
and rule over Babylon, similarly gestures to a kind of femininity which assumes a
dominant position by adopting features of masculinity. Amazons and Semiramis
both held contested positions within early modern culture. On the one hand the
Amazons of antiquity were respected as a lost, noble middle-eastern civilization
(noble so long as it stayed lost). On the other hand, when Morose in Epicoene
calls his wife a “Semiramis,” the moniker is not a compliment: Morose condemns
her lack of feminine modesty out of the recognition that to him she poses a violent
threat.36 While I have so far explored moments when male authors assume
artificial female personae, authors like Jinner emphasize that for women (if we
180
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
accept Capp’s evidence that Jinner was female) gender bending and drag were
also important ways of overcoming barriers placed against women writers. After
listing ancient Amazon queens, Jinner moves to the less controversial but still
abstractly Amazonian Elizabeth I, invoking this queen’s intelligence and virtue: “I
fear me I shall never see the like again, most of your Princes now a dayes, are like
Dunces in comparison of her: either they have not the wit, or the honesty that she
hath.”37 Jinner’s more recent examples (the Countess of Newcastle and Katherine
Phillips) and famous female practitioners of physic (the Countess of Kent and
Maria Cunitia) are not especially Amazonian, but Jinner’s preface suggests that
Amazons are examples of women who prove themselves competent and even
superior to men in an arena in which men strive to keep women from gaining
proficiency (battle for Amazons; wit and science for Englishwomen). By using
Amazons as her example Jinner means to cement her authority, but she also calls
to mind the clear sense that she is overstepping the bounds of her gender, as
Ginnor threatens to do outright in the preface to her mock almanac.
Jinner’s list of examples illustrates a connection between her authorial
persona as a female almanac compiler and Amazonian drag (Amazonian drag
defined as the act of assuming masculine habits and behaviours while making
one’s feminine sex plain). Given what little detail readers expected to know about
almanac compilers, the Jinner author could easily have concealed her sex and
passed as a man if she or her publishers thought her sex would prove to be a
liability. Instead, the Jinner author and her publishers chose to create a female
181
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
authorial persona knowing they might have to defend her competency as an
astrologer. This choice suggests that the perceived value of the female perspective
outweighed such costs. While the Jinner author could have passed as a male
author, she instead puts on the intellectual habits she and her readers code as
masculine while using Amazon examples to communicate and place value on the
discrepancy between masculine habits and the women who perform them.
Jinner’s authorial persona ultimately maintains enough feminine modesty
and deference to be taken seriously, despite controversial references to Amazons,
but Ginnor’s persona plays up stereotypes of female unruliness. These stereotypes
lend further credit to misogynistic assumptions that women are not capable of the
discipline and self-control male scholars possess and should therefore be steered
away from intellectual pursuits. Ginnor mocks Jinner’s citational rhetoric, for
instance, writing “I need not quote them [referring to Jinner’s list of famous
female queens and authors] for I think few of our Sex so ignorant but they have
been either read or heard of them.”38 But in failing to quote the names Ginnor
misses the point of Jinner’s list, which is not to provide readers with new
information but to demonstrate her intellectual and educational credentials to her
readership. The Ginnor author makes Ginnor, Jinner, and female authors by
extension seem naïve and uneducated. Ginnor’s attempt to discredit Jinner does
not hold up to close scrutiny, however. Ginnor fails to expose Jinner as an
intellectual fraud.
182
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Jinner’s prefaces in the following years’ almanacs offer no further
defences of female authorship. Jinner does, however, return in 1659 to defend the
inclusion of sexually explicit content in her almanacs. Weber argues that Ginnor’s
sexual humour “precisely realizes Jinner’s fears about the misappropriation and
misunderstanding of her text by male readers.” But Jinner herself shows little fear
or misapprehension about the sexual content of her almanacs and even defends
such content in the preface to her second almanac. She is “encouraged” to write
again, she explains, “seeing that [her first almanac] was so well accepted” last
year.39 She does, however, hint that some took offence at her sexually explicit
content and that as a result this year she will be “avoiding such Language, as may,
perhaps be offensive to some, whose tender Ears cannot away with the hearing of
what, without scruple, they will do.”40 Jinner thus acknowledges a critique of her
work but turns that critique immediately back upon her readers, whose offence
seems at best like needless prudery and at worst like hypocrisy. “It is not fit the
world should be deprived of such helps to Nature, for want of which, many by
their Modesty, suffer much,” Jinner continues, likely referring to the recipes at the
back of her almanac which will help women care for themselves and any children
born as a result of the many astrological instances of wantonness Jinner predicts
in her prognostications. When Jinner again advises readers to buy the
gynaecological manuals she excerpts in her almanacs, she does so in order to
provide sanitary or healthful information, so “that those parts might be kept in
good case and serve to the mutual comfort of man and woman.”41 Jinner does
183
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
contextualize the sexually explicit information she provides as gynaecological,
but she demonstrates no squeamishness towards sexuality and reproves those who
do.
While as modern critics we might see Jinner drawing a distinction here
between what critics have identified as Jinner’s gynaecological “helps to nature”
and Ginnor’s pornographic pastiche, we have no evidence to suspect that Jinner
would have drawn such a distinction or have feared her readers’ misapprehension
on the subject. Distinctions between gynaecology and pornography did exist in
seventeenth-century England, but they remained blurry until the eighteenth
century. The 1660 pornographic text The Practical Part of Love, for instance,
describes a library of erotic works on whose shelves Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and
English pornographic pamphlets like The Crafty Whore sit next to “all sorts books
of Midwifery, as Culpepper’s Midwife, the compleat midwife, the birth of
Mankind, Child-birth, &c.”42 While gynaecological manual authors like Thomas
Raynalde in 1545 exhorted readers to “use everything herein entreated of the
purpose wherefor it was written,” meaning specifically, as he outlines, to aid in
childbirth and not shame women with lewd conversation,43 Jinner gives her
readers no such directions on how they should read her sexual content: only that
they should not take offence at its presence. Modern critics, writing in a culture
with well-established boundaries between gynaecological content and
pornographic content which render the former respectable and the latter degrading
184
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
have a tendency to read more into such distinctions than early modern readers
would have.
Weber identifies the Ginnor almanac as the "product of a male pen” based
on the fact that “[i]n addition to parodic weather predictions, gender satire runs
throughout the work.”44 What goes unrecognized in Weber’s analysis, however, is
how much Jinner herself adopts a satirical and stereotypical view of gender in her
predictions, and how much sexual humour she includes when forecasting events.
Ginnor’s prediction that “Venus in the 12 house in exaltation, applying to
combustion with the Sun, denoteth that women will be more free then usual in
bestowing the P— on their Clients,” 45 is only slightly different from Jinner’s
1658 prediction that “Venus in the twelfth house, in exultation, but applying to
combustion with the Sun, signifieth that end women will be more apt than
ordinary in bestowing the Pox upon their Clients.” The most significant difference
Ginnor introduces is the obscuring of the word “pox,” which makes Ginnor’s
phrase less explicit than Jinner’s (though perhaps more titillating).46 Ginnor’s
entire prognostication is likewise plagiarized from a small excerpt of Jinner’s
1658 prognostication for the year, with only small wording changes. Ginnor’s
almanac does include a page or so of sexually explicit material that does not
originate from Jinner, but in the main when critics discuss Ginnor’s pornographic
content, they are discussing words the Jinner author in fact published.
Weber writes that the Ginnor almanac “provides important evidence for
the reception of Jinner’s legitimate works, and women’s medical writing in
185
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
general” by “[r]einforcing misogynistic stereotypes of females as lascivious and
sexually deceitful.”47 Again, however, many of the outright misogynistic and
stereotypical comments Ginnor has to make about women are taken from Jinner.
Jinner writes that “Mercury to a quartil of Mars (& Pisces and Gemini, giveth
some of our sex (that are not paysed with virtue) a rare faculty of scolding, in
other some muteness and sullenness,” reinforcing the negative stereotype that
women either talk too much (and are labelled scolds) or talk too little (and are
labelled sullen) with little-to-no safe middle ground.48 Although astrologers
typically believed individuals had a measure of free will and could resist the pull
of the stars, Jinner discounts women’s abilities to control their sexual urges,
telling her readers to “beware marrying in the spring, for Scorpio being in the
seventh house intercepted, denoteth unseemly wantonness and lightness in
women.”49 Ginnor changes Jinner’s “muteness and sullenness” to “sullenness and
perverseness,” and adds “lechery” to Jinner’s “wantonness” and “lightness,” but
these slight intensifications do not significantly reduce the misogynistic
assumptions of Jinner’s predictions. Ginnor’s almanac does supplement Jinner’s
predictions with additional jokes about female sexual insatiability, including an
astrological image of three overlapping circles of the moon and clouds that bear
passing resemblance to male genitalia and writing below it “the happiness of our
Sex doth appear in most splendour, when the Moon appears so clouded, as in this
following Figure, dark nights being to us as a fountain, whence flows all our
mirth, joy, pleasure, sports, and melodious recreations."50 But Jinner’s
186
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
descriptions of planets like Venus “in corporeal conjunction,” “exultation,” and
“combustion” can all likewise be read both as astrological terms and as explicit
sexual puns, especially since Venus represents not only the planet but the goddess
of love and sexual desire. The Jinner author and the Ginnor author thus share a
sense that misogynistic humour about women’s sexual insatiability is appropriate
for a female-authored almanac that focuses on women’s issues. Whether these
predictions would have appealed to women readers is another matter, but both
authorial personae include misogynistic jokes as part of their almanacs’
attractions.
The most significant distinction between Ginnor and Jinner ultimately is
that while Ginnor’s text provides misogynistic jokes, sexual jokes, and astrology
jokes, it provides little else. Jinner’s explicit predictions concern extramarital sex,
but they also concern conventional marital sexuality, politics, foreign affairs, and
religious controversies. Ginnor’s almanac removes the surrounding predictions,
stopping in fact just short of Jinner’s 1658 advice to women on when to marry.
Jinner’s advice often concerns promiscuous women (wantons) and men, as in the
prediction for the Sun’s entrance into Libra in 1658, where with “Venus being in
Scorpio, I fear me that the naughty wantons of our sex as well as the other sex
will be peppered with the pox, and if so, wo be to your Noses; it is malignant to
catch it at this time.”51 But in the next sentence she offers advice to chaste,
married women on when best to conceive, noting that “In this Figure, the Dragon
head being in Sagittary denoteth fruitfulness to honest women.”52 Jinner’s
187
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
predictions echo the religious, moral strictures which govern sexuality in society –
the wantons receive malignant, disfiguring venereal diseases from their
astrologically-ordained urges to copulate, while the honest (married) women
receive children. But there’s a certain equality in tone by which Jinner seems to
take both iterations of female sexuality – the wanton whore and the honest wife –
as a given. Ginnor includes the prediction of wantons and venereal disease from
Jinner’s original almanac but omits the mention of honest women and children.
Jinner’s recipes also provide a context for the sexual predictions that Ginnor
cannot replicate. While Jinner’s almanac certainly does contain passages which
mobilize misogynistic stereotypes about female sexuality, it addresses female
sexual desire and provides tips for women on how best to manage such desires,
among the multiple other functions the almanac performs. Ginnor’s almanac, on
the other hand, appeals primarily to an audience interested in sexual and
astrological humour and drawn by the perceived connection between authorial
female personae and sexually explicit content. Thus, while Ginnor effectively
reproduces a certain element of Jinner’s almanacs, her almanacs cannot pass for
Jinner’s because her almanacs do not recreate the complex interplay of genres and
tones that Jinner’s almanacs strive to balance. Since Jinner’s almanac like all
almanacs sought to fill “a wide variety of roles, cheaply and concisely,” there is
no reason for the Jinner author to object to using a female authorial persona to its
full benefit in attracting readers interested in sexually explicit material as well as
readers interested gynaecological reference.53 The profits the Company and the
188
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Jinner author hoped to make in appealing to both groups clearly outweighed the
danger of offending potential customers sensitive to explicit sexual content.
Jinner’s Silences and Jinner’s Successes as a Voice of Republican Critique
Jinner’s 1658 almanac must have sold well enough for the Stationers’
Company to renew her license the following two years, but Jinner’s almanacs
never became a long-running series. None appear between 1660 and 1662
(although critics speculate that these almanacs may have existed and have not
been preserved). The Company published an almanac for 1664 under Jinner’s
name, but Curth casts doubts on whether this text was authored by the original
Jinner author, as it lacks many of the features (title page illustration, preface,
prognostications) that Jinner’s earlier almanacs possessed.54 Did Jinner’s novelty
as a female almanac compiler simply fade? Was the Jinner author cowed by
Ginnor’s parody, which was published sometime in 1659 either before or after
Ginnor was compiling her almanac for 1660?55 Were readers unsettled or
alienated by Ginnor’s parody, causing Jinner’s sales to drop off? Harvey’s
paradigm of the ventriloquized voice holds that the phenomenon of men writing
as women constitutes “an appropriation of the feminine voice” that “reflects and
contributes to a larger cultural silencing of women.”56 My findings in the previous
chapters have tended to support Harvey’s thesis, as sexualized female personae
seem to shut down opportunities for female-led resistance and female-authored
189
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
political critique in Epicoene, Swetnam the Woman-Hater, and Civil War political
pamphlets. If we view Ginnor’s pamphlet as an instance of ventriloquism, we
might conclude that Ginnor’s attempts to discredit the Jinner persona specifically
and female authors more broadly succeeded in ruining the Jinner author’s career
despite her attempts to continue in the face of criticism. While we cannot
definitively gauge Ginnor’s effect on the Jinner author or on the Jinner almanac’s
sales, however, this final section will explore an alternate hypothesis for Jinner’s
silence. It was not Ginnor’s parody which shut the Jinner author out of the
almanac market, I posit. Rather it was the Jinner author’s success in harnessing a
sexualized female persona for political critique that made her almanacs too risky a
venture to continue under the censoring oversight of the Stationers’ Company’s
licensing system. Assuming the Jinner author was female makes this a rare
instance in which a female author adopts the unruly sexualized female persona as
a means to offer salient republican critiques of patriarchal hierarchies that
concentrated power in the hands of a few corrupt male elites.
While Jinner’s female persona would have drawn attention, Jinner’s
politics would also have set her almanacs apart from more mainstream ones, and
the combination of her novel female persona and her striking republican politics
would have served to draw like-minded readers into purchasing her titles. Capp
writes that although almanacs in the 1640s marketed themselves by appealing to
political partisanship, offering prognostications that would appeal to either
190
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
royalist or parliamentary supporters the way newsbooks would, censorship
tightened gradually between the regicide and the Protectorate.57 Jinner’s almanacs
in the late 1650s offer a distinctive republican (anti-Cromwellian) slant that make
her, along with Nicholas Culpeper, one of only two almanac compilers to criticize
the Protectorate regime in print.58 Jinner does not announce herself as a republican
anywhere in the preface or title page of her work but the presence of her printer’s
name, John Streater, on the title page, would have hinted at her republican bias
since Streater was a strident republican pamphleteer and printer of John Tanner’s
equally strident 1650s republican almanacs. The Stationers assigned the work of
printing almanacs to various members of the company, so Streater and Jinner may
not have had a directly collaborative relationship, but the Company could not
have paired Jinner with a more complementary printer than Streater, who not only
shared her republican beliefs but also specialized in the printing of medical texts
that Jinner excerpted in her recipes and encouraged her readers to buy. While
Jinner’s name was likely unknown at the time of her first almanac’s publication,
Streater’s would have helped attract the two specific and different niches of
readers Jinner’s almanacs would most appeal to: those interested in cheap
gynaecological information and those with republican political leanings.
Almanacs were typically due to the Stationers’ Company in July and were
sold in late October, so in establishing a political context for an almanac the
timeframe to consider is the summer of the preceding year the almanac was
191
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
compiled for. Compilers based their predictions on complex astrological laws and
not on their own partisan hopes for a specific outcome, but, as Capp writes, “the
high degree of subjectivity in astrological judgements” made it easy for political
astrologers to consciously or unconsciously “manipulat[e] the stars into party
allegiance.”59 “Where the textbook stated that a particular conjunction
foreshadowed the death of a ruler, or some upheaval in the church,” Capp argues,
“the almanac-maker was willing to publish a specific and partisan judgment on an
individual party or sect … stretching rather than breaking astrological laws.”60
The specific political context in which almanacs were compiled thus plays a role
in how compilers might have interpreted the astrological data they calculated for a
coming year. Further, the illusion of distance provided by the act of projecting a
future that was still mutable may have enabled compilers to subtly comment on
the tensions and conflicts of recent times without risking charges of sedition.
Jinner’s predictions for 1658, for instance, reflect and subtly comment on
the political situation of the summer of 1657. 1657 was a particularly bleak year
for republicans, though perhaps not as bleak as 1653, when the republican
Commonwealth government of the rump parliament fell to Oliver Cromwell’s
military coup. Republican ideology rose to its peak in the early 1650s, after the
regicide, when the parliamentarians set out to design a new commonwealth to
replace England’s monarchical system. Republicanism, like the populist Leveller
movements, embraced the role of common citizens as active participants in
government. When Cromwell forcibly disbanded the rump parliament in 1653,
192
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
transforming an admittedly dysfunctional Commonwealth into a Protectorate,
hopes for radical republican reform suffered extensively. By the summer of 1657,
the promise of a representative, participatory Protectorate government had long
since dissolved, and efforts to limit Cromwell’s power or bring him under some
kind of parliamentary oversight had failed. In June of 1657, after rejecting
petitions from parliamentarians to accept the crown (which would define and limit
the Protector’s powers based on precedent), Cromwell had himself installed as
Lord Protector for life with the new right to appoint his own successor.
Jinner’s monthly prediction for January 1658 – “The Commonalty every
where vered, endeavour to pry into affairs of State for which they are checked by
the Frowns of Authority” – calls to mind the situation of the spring of 1657 and
predicts that nothing will change significantly in the intervening months. The
“Commonalty” refers to citizens without rank in its most basic meaning, but may
also refer to the House of Commons, whose position in government is to represent
the interests of those people. The Commons’ attempt to “pry” by trying to bind
Cromwell’s powers with a new constitution (the Humble Petition and Advice)
failed, as the final revised version of the Humble Petition and Advice that
Cromwell signed actually centralized Cromwell’s powers in a compromise that
frustrated both parliament and the army.61 But despite failed attempts in 1657,
Jinner predicts that the commonality will continue to pry in the coming year. If we
interpret “prying” to constitute more direct interventions from the common
people, we might note that in April of 1657, as Cromwell and parliament
193
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
negotiated Cromwell’s reappointment, militant Fifth Monarchists staged an armed
uprising in London and were defeated. Jinner’s predictions thus reflect back
subtly on the failed interventions of the previous year but encourage continued
militancy among groups like the Fifth Monarchists and the Levellers who claim to
represent the interests of the “common” people (the rank and file of the army, the
religious minorities persecuted by the majority, and those without rank who
sought to have more of a political voice).
Aside from offering encouragement, however, the prediction also
comments on the tensions between “Authority,” or the Protectorate government,
and the people it originally set out to represent. While the common people have to
“pry” into affairs of state that as a republican Jinner believes do and should
concern them, the government “frowns” at the commonalty’s efforts to participate
without giving them fair consideration. The Protectorate’s abuse of its
prerogatives seems especially hypocritical in light of the fact that Cromwell and
many of his supporters fought against King Charles I on the charges that he
abused his own prerogatives and expected to rule England without seriously
consulting with his subjects’ political representatives. While astrologers and
almanac compilers frequently predicted civil unrest during this period, Jinner’s
wording suggests that both the people and the state are overreaching their
positions – that because the people are prying and the state is frowning, no
harmonious balance can be achieved. This imbalance in the political section, as I
194
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
will discuss shortly, trickles down to affect a myriad of other factors that keep
England in a state of disorder, from the weather to women’s chastity.
Jinner’s predictions for 1659 illustrate the same cynical lack of faith in the
Protectorate government. In her prognostication for the coming year, Jinner writes
that “Governors and Princes are very powerful in their Councels and Resolutions
and are very much ayded by this Position [of the stars], in their putting in
execution their Arbitrary commands to the detriment of the people.”62 The tone of
the relationship described between government and people illustrates again that
Jinner dismisses any potential harmony between the highest government officials
and the common people. In the 1659 predictions, however, Jinner critiques only
the Governors as “arbitrary” and makes no mention of the commonalty trying to
pry or assert rights she feels it is not owed. Jinner does present an optimistic
outlook on future generations of low-ranking civil servants and magistrates,
however, writing that “The Undertakings of the people shall have very great
success, Most of the children that are born this year shall be of more noble and
generous dispositions then ordinary, more fit for Magistracy and publike Trust,
more apt to gain Estates, and more ingenuous fitter to be made Councellors, and
to study the Sciences, then those that have been born for many years last past."63
While the royalist mock petitions of the 1640s feared a generation of city-bred
sons who would grow up without aristocratic graces, Jinner voices the republican
view that locates England’s hope for good government in the distribution of
power amongst new generations of people. Instead of investing her hopes in any
195
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
one powerful leader, she looks forward to a generation of individuals who, guided
by generosity, judgment, and scientific rationality, rather than by the privileges of
wealth or birth, will grow up to regain the public trust.
While Jinner carefully maintains a semblance of matter-of-fact neutrality
in the prognostication section of her almanacs, hinting at political biases only in
subtle word choices, the monthly observations for the 1659 and 1660 almanacs
make her anti-government position far clearer. In the 1659 predictions for
October, for instance, after she conveys that “The Eminent contend about dividing
the spoil of the Inferiour, who standeth still the while, A misery not the Last, that
Mankind is too often cast into,” she counsels her readers to arm themselves “to
avoid the evil of it, else you must arm with patience to submit to it.”64 Jinner
quickly asserts herself in the first person in the next line to inform her readers
(and her censors) that “I speak of no other Arms, lest I should be taken to be a
Trumpet to precede Rebellion.”65 Yet she “venture[s]… that a people are not
bound to obey well, when Governors do not govern well.”66 Jinner’s critique of
frowning authority, arbitrary government, and otherwise tyrannical powers
opposed to the people’s liberty and prosperity makes it plain enough here that she
would hold no English citizen bound to obey the Protectorate government under
these standards. In the following month’s observations she comments that “The
great Ones” in London, by which she means the rich and powerful, “are jealous of
their condition, and much question their safety, which hath no other foundation
than the humour of the people.”67 As Lois G. Schwoerer remarks in her analysis
196
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
of women’s public political voice in England, Jinner is one of a handful of female
authors to base “her criticism of Cromwell on a theory of government,” in these
lines “[r]eflecting knowledge of a theory of rebellion.”68 Jinner’s critique of the
Protectorate regime in the prognostications near the beginning of her almanacs
morphs into rationalizations for popular riot in the smaller print of the monthly
astrological observations at the back (which move from a tone of predicting the
major events of the coming months to actively trying to inspire her readers to help
overthrow the government).
The lack of harmony between people and government across all three
almanacs extends to manifestations of disorder across a range of other issues. As
Jinner remarks in her 1659 almanac, astrological signs of intemperance in the
weather breed political discord as well, so that in January’s astrological
observations she comments that “The Season is not more turbulent and unconstant
then the Affairs of State.”69 Alongside correspondences between the seasons and
political changes, Jinner interprets the alignment of the planets and stars in 1659
to mean rises in “excessive covetousness” and greed, in “most miserable and
wicked murder and cruelties,” in “Diseases of the belly, trouble of the mind,
Shipwracks, Tempests, and Thievery.” Finally, she ties wholesale social and
moral disaster to sexual disorder, writing that “Venus being in the 7th house also
prognosticateth terrible Adulteries and Fornications, the loss of abundance of
Maiden-heads, and the desire of old women to young men.”70 While Jinner’s
prognostications in the 1658 almanac were organized into astrological
197
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
observations that would interest “the Publick” (i.e., those which concerned
political change), followed by alignments of the cosmos that would interest “more
particularly our Sex” (those which concerned sexuality), the subsequent almanacs
make no such divisions between the public’s concerns and the concerns of
women, and they make fewer distinctions between political and sexual topics. The
“terrible adulteries” Jinner predicts for 1659 due to Venus’s position are put on a
seemingly equal plane with the “wicked murders” brought by Mars, and both
serve to highlight that when one element of the social fabric is in disarray all other
elements suffer.
In her analysis of an April eclipse Jinner extends the general
prognostication for the year to the specific astrological event, writing “I cannot
promise too much honesty of our Sex, but something more then ordinary this
year,” and advises seamen on the day of the eclipse “who are of any repute and
credit, that intend Wedlock, not to look so low as the blew Apron, but have higher
thoughts” and assures them “good successe in their amorous Courtings.”71
Jinner’s commentary on sexuality, therefore, does not serve solely to appeal to
women readers with specific material tailored for them, nor does it serve solely to
titillate and amuse readers with descriptions of sexual encounters to come.
Jinner’s sexual predictions are part of the almanac’s broader attempt to promote
its political view of England as a nation suffering under a tyrannous and arbitrary
government.
198
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
While specific political predictions are vaguely phrased to avoid
censorship and meet the Stationers’ Company’s standards, veiled political
commentary combines with the other signs that the country is in a serious crisis to
create a strong critique of the Protectorate government’s ability to rule the country
in a fair, judicious, and harmonious manner. The sexual predictions of wantonness
are part of Jinner’s republican message that Protectorate England is out of control,
just as the antics of the promiscuous Mistress Parliament in the popular pamphlet
series of 1648 conveyed a royalist message that the parliamentary leaders were
not up to the task of replacing the king as head of state. Jinner uses sexuality for a
variety of purposes in her almanac, but one of those purposes is to signal to her
readers that the patriarchal system is in crisis. For the pseudonymous female
personae of the Civil Wars, the very presence of sexualized female voices in
popular discourse was itself a sign that patriarchal hierarchies were failing. Jinner,
however, enacts a separation between illicit sexuality (which takes place in the
future among her readers) and her own authorial persona, which acts as an
observer and interpreter of the future but never quite a participant. Jinner thus
manages to use the connections between disorderly sexuality and political critique
of failing patriarchal hierarchy without having such a critique rebound on her to
delegitimize her position as a female almanac compiler.
The 1660 almanac predicts much of the same political turmoil, but
projects (accurately, as it turns out) that most of the strife will be internal to the
government and not between the government and the common people. Jinner’s
199
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
prediction for January 1660, for instance, is that there will be “Little action, but
much Debates and Consultations, tending to Action. If any be, it will break forth
with much violence. Some are struck with blindness of the Eyes; but more with
blindness of the Mind."72 The 1660 almanac was compiled in the summer of 1659
after Richard Cromwell succeeded his father Oliver as Protector in September of
1658, struggled to find a means to keep Protectorate finances afloat without
antagonizing either the army or the parliamentary factions, and abdicated in late
May of 1659.73 While Jinner criticizes the arbitrariness of the Protectorate
government and its abuse of power, she views the parliamentary England of the
past as a place of futility and senseless violence. Jinner’s prediction that in
February 1659 “Several men of good wit and Genius will rise; but when risen,
they have no Lease of their Honours: There is nothing here that is permanent,”74
projects that other men may rise to try to fill the vacuum left by Oliver Cromwell
and the kings before him, but expresses a general cynicism towards all figures of
authority.
Jinner’s 1660 almanac is the most overtly political, but also the most
pessimistic. If it went to press in July, as most almanacs did, then Jinner was
writing while England was once again under control of the rump parliament that
had overseen Charles I’s defeat and regicide. Fears of royalist uprisings were high
throughout the spring and early summer of 1659, but the largest and most
successful royalist rebellions took place in August. By the time readers could
purchase Jinner’s 1660 almanac in October of 1659, parliament had temporarily
200
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
suppressed most of the royalist uprisings but was hard-pressed to keep the army
on its side due to the large sums owed in pay arrears and long-standing political
conflicts between army officers and MPs. Jinner’s predictions warn against siding
with the army, whose “Souldiers declineth Reputation and grow weak in the
opinion of most men: the Nation strugleth to arrive at Liberty; but particular
Interest preventeth it as yet."75 Jinner concludes her 1660 almanac with a monthly
observation for December that, instead of confidently predicting the future,
reflects back on the three almanacs she has written and expresses doubtful hope
that the political situation will improve. She writes that “Since I first writ, I have
had nothing but sad Tidings, Changes, and Overturnings to prognosticate: I hope
this year will determine of those dangers, that we shall be no more subject to
those uncertainties, which are the bringers forth of Misery and Want to this
Nation.”76 We may plausibly suppose that in the increased upheaval of 1660,
which brought an army-led coup, armed conflict, and finally the Restoration of
the Stuart monarchy, Jinner was either too preoccupied or too dejected to write an
almanac for 1661.
We might also plausibly suppose, however, that the gap in Jinner’s
almanacs in the early years of the Restoration consists of a form of censorship.
Jinner, and the Stationers’ Company who licensed her almanacs, risked serious
repercussions if censors decided that her predictions about the downfall of the
government constituted or were meant to incite actions against the government.
As she writes in her 1660 almanac, she is taking precautions against charges of
201
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
censorship: “It is not convenient nor safe to particularize either persons or things:
therefore we shall take the liberty to set forth things in the modest and most
generall terms, that thereby we may avoid offence and danger, that other wise will
fall inevitably upon us” from the “evil minds of those in Power.”77 Announcing
one’s intentions to conceal controversial predictions in general terms seems like
precisely the sort of gesture that might draw a censor’s attention (although it was
also typical of the almanac genre, which sought to attract readers with promises of
controversy). In Jinner’s case, however, the “general terms” she promises fail to
thoroughly conceal her hostility towards the ruling powers. Although we have no
record that she was among those compilers who were censored, it is entirely
possible that the Stationers’ Company chose not to license her almanacs in the
early 1660s in order to avoid facing the ire of the newly restored Stuart
government. That the Restoration brought about a change in the Stationers’
almanac licenser from the parliamentarian John Booker to the royalist George
Wharton may also explain why Jinner’s almanacs fell briefly out of favour.
While the Ginnor almanac’s parody of Jinner’s female authorial persona
attacked Jinner’s legitimacy and authority as a female astrologer, it seems likely
that the reason Jinner’s almanac series ended was that censors and the Stationers’
Company did, in fact, take her political predictions seriously. Jinner’s final 1664
almanac, the only almanac of hers published during the Restoration, contains
sexual and gynaecological recipes but no political predictions. Jinner’s
prognostication does project that many “Theeves shall have ill success in their
202
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
undertakings” and that many men will “contemn Marriage” and pursue women
only for lust’s sake, thus perhaps hinting very distantly at disapproval for Charles
II’s Cavalier court, but the monthly observations that in previous almanacs were
full of political predictions are in the 1664 almanac filled only with husbandry
advice.78 The 1664 almanac also removes many of the elements that defined
Jinner’s female authorial persona. The image that appeared on all three previous
almanacs – a fine, engraved portrait of a young attractive woman – does not
appear on the 1664 almanac. The 1664 almanac includes no authorial preface, and
it might be plausible that the almanac was composed by someone other than the
Jinner author were it not for the presence of the Jinner author’s characteristically
unapologetic sexual content and pessimism in the prognostication. Missing its
political commentary and female authorial persona, the 1664 almanac does not
seem to have been a great success, for the series was not renewed.
Ginnor’s response to Jinner’s 1658 al manac was to isolate Jinner’s
sexually explicit material and cast away Jinner’s political and social observations
entirely. While Ginnor’s parody insults Jinner’s range as an author and astrologist,
it also renders Jinner a more containable threat to patriarchal hierarchy by
insisting that her interests in women and sexuality make her a frivolous astrologist
unworthy of serious consideration as a political voice. In fact, those interests in
sexuality, I have argued, were anything but inconsequential to her critique of the
Protectorate regime. While parodic female sexuality proved a useful political tool
for the authors of 1640s porno-political rhetoric, Ginnor’s pamphlet is strikingly
203
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
apolitical. Except for a chronology of “Some memorable Accidents happened
since 1639,” which traces the dates of the Civil Wars and Interregnum periods
from the beginning of the long parliament to the death of Oliver Cromwell in
1658, the almanac makes no references to political figures, leaders, or factions of
any kind. Unlike most elements of Ginnor’s almanac this list of political events
carries no perceivably satirical or humorous purpose. The first Poor Robin
almanac of 1664 (which began the long-running series of Stationers’-approved
burlesque almanacs) included many satirical chronologies which joked about the
discrepancies between “Loyal” royalist chronologies and “Fanatick” chronologies
which traced the devil’s influence in English politics.79 Although chronologies
afforded opportunities for parody and satire, Ginnor shies away from political
commentary and offers a standard, neutral account of the relevant dates and
events.
Ginnor’s chronology does neatly encapsulate, however, what has been a
highly tumultuous period in English history in which nearly all forms of
traditional hierarchy and authority faced substantial challenges. The twenty-year
period is marked by battles, executions, military coups, and deaths. The presence
of Ginnor’s parodic voice on the almanac market is in and of itself a signal of the
troubled times of 1659, when in the absence of a stable patriarchal head of state
female authors like Jinner are able to publish alongside male compilers with
prefaces that assert the intellectual equality of the sexes. Rather than use the
parodic female persona to mount a coherent political critique, the Ginnor author
204
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
instead attempts to neutralize Jinner’s efforts. Given that Ginnor’s chronology
ends with the death of Cromwell in September 1658, however, it seems likely that
Ginnor’s faux almanac did not deter Jinner from publishing a follow-up almanac
in 1660 after Ginnor’s almanac had been published. Jinner’s almanac series
ended, I propose, because she ran afoul of licensers or censors, and not because
she failed to find an audience as a female compiler writing on an unwholesome
topic like sexuality. If we accept this theory, we can then view Jinner as the first
writer to find acceptance and/or pass as a female author while successfully
harnessing female sexuality as a tool for political critique.
Notes
1
Although I assert a distinction between “the Jinner author,” whose sex is
ultimately unknown, and “Sarah Jinner,” I will refer to the Jinner author as “her”
given that there are no compelling reasons to doubt that the Jinner author was
female and critics refer to Jinner as female.
2
Although Weber makes reference to one scholar, Ann Geneva, who challenged
the Jinner author’s female authorship in an unpublished conference paper, he
provides this citation only to establish a ground for his argument that Jinner was
female. Weber, “Women’s Early Modern Medical Almanacs in Historical
Context,” 360. Weber cites a note in Mack’s Visionary Women, p. 84, n.122.
3
Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500-1800, 23.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid, 33.
6
As Adam Smyth writes, “the almanac becomes a conduit, a temporary
storehouse for records which are then passed on, and it is useful to think of
almanacs as one point in a dense network of texts. Diarists often seem to have
generated a life through this process of transferring material, revising and
expanding records with each movement, employing the almanac as an early
(although not necessarily initial) site of recording,” “Almanacs, Annotators, and
205
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Life-Writing in Early Modern England,” 222.
7
The portrait appears on the title page of two anonymous pamphlets: the undated
Cupids Master-piece, or, The Free-school of Witty and Delightful Complements
and The Ladies Remonstrance (1659). The Ladies Remonstrance styles itself after
the 1640s mock petitions and combines highly explicit sexual content with a
critique of the rump parliament.
8
Capp, Astrology, 33.
9
Ibid, 28.
10
See Feist, “The Stationers’ Voice The English Almanac the Early Eighteenth
Trade Century in the Early Eighteenth Century,” 10. Feist writes that the 1603
patent “proved to be the Company’s “goldmine, a source of significant
commercial and political power for nearly two centuries. King James had
intended the monopoly to provide £200 yearly for the Company’s poor, but the
Stock produced profits far above this amount, and the excess benefitted
shareholders rather than the poor” (10).
11
Feist, 56.
12
As Capp recounts, astrologers William Lilly and John Booker were so
influential in stirring up popular sentiment for the parliamentary cause that they
were “invited to join the troops at the siege of Colchester in 1648, and passages
from Lilly's almanac were read to encourage the English soldiers invading
Scotland a little later." Astrology, 75.
13
Ibid, 67.
14
The recipes included varied slightly from year to year and were excerpted in
part from the longer medical reference works Jinner recommends her readers
purchase. As Weber notes, “These receipts indicate that Jinner was developing a
woman’s medicine concerned with the physical, emotional and psychological
needs of her patients,” see “Introductory Note,” p. xiii.
15
Capp, Astrology, 64.
16
Ibid, 42-3. As Capp remarks, “The market for almanacs was not infinitely
expandable. The Company recognized that excessive expansion would result
merely in more unsold copies at the end of the year, and accordingly restricted the
number of titles and copies printed. Aspirant authors sent their work to the
Company which referred it to one of the established London astrologers” but
“[t]he chances of acceptance were slight" (42).
17
Curth, “The Medical Content of English Almanacs 1640-1700,” 260.
18
Feist, 49.
19
Ibid, 48-9.
20
Herbert, “Captain Henry Herbert’s Narrative of His Journey Through France
with His Regiment, 1671-3,” 349.
21
Capp, “Jinner, Sarah (fl. 1658–1664)," n.p.
22
Ibid.
206
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
23
Weber, “Introductory Note,” xii.
Harvey writes about the “appropriation of the midwives’ voices in the
obstetrical books of the early seventeenth century, which are spoken almost
exclusively by men, who, however sympathetic to women and female midwives,
nevertheless effect a kind of usurpation” (92). The first English midwife to write
an obstetrical manual, Jane Sharp, would not publish it until 1671.
25
Almanacs, as I and other critics have noted, were branded as the products of
their compilers but this branding obscures the amount of collaboration and
borrowing that went into their production. Almanacs series often began as
submissions from a single compiler but were then often continued by other
anonymous compilers under the original name long after that original compiler
ceased to write for the series. Further, not all compilers were responsible for
producing the entire contents of their almanacs; some compilers wrote only the
prognostication sections of their almanacs and used standard sorts (the ephemeris
tables) provided by the Stationers’ Company. Many compilers like Jinner did not
actually write the reference material they included in their almanacs but instead
curated it and reproduced from other works without clearly identifying sources.
Licensers who chose which almanacs to publish were responsible for ensuring
that the content of each almanac was acceptable and could censor even the most
commercially acceptable almanacs, requiring that offensive lines be cut or
modified. Senior members of the Stationers’ Company responsible for the
profitability of the English Stock had direct influence on which almanacs were
produced, which authors were hired to write for which series, and how the
profitable series were distributed among their members for printing.
26
The current electronic edition of Early English Books Online edition includes a
note in the record questioning whether the almanac is pseudonymous but the work
remains attributed to Jinner.
27
Weber, “Introductory Note,” xxi.
28
Curth, English Almanacs, Astrology and Popular Medicine: 1550-1700, 69.
29
Jinner, “An Almanack and Prognostication for the Year of Our Lord 1658,” 17.
30
Ibid.
31
Jinner argues in “An Almanack and Prognostication… 1658” that women “have
as good judgment and memory and I am sure as good fancy as men, if not better,”
although “it is the policy of men, to keep us from education and schooling” (17).
32
Ginnor [pseud.], “The Womans Almanack,” 253.
33
Jinner, “An Almanack and Prognostication... 1658,” 18.
34
Ibid.
35
Ginnor [pseud.], “The Womans Almanack,” 253.
36
Jonson, 1.1.48-9.
37
Jinner, “An Almanack and Prognostication… 1658,” 17.
38
Ginnor, 253.
24
207
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
39
Jinner, “An Almanack and Prognostication... 1659,” 59.
Ibid.
41
Ibid.
42
Anon., The Practical Part of Love, 40.
43
Raynalde, The Birth of Mankind, 22.
44
Weber, “Women’s Early Modern Medical Almanacs,” 386.
45
Jinner, “An Almanack and Prognostication... 1658,” 20.
46
Ginnor [pseud.], “The Womans Almanack,” 254.
47
Weber, “Women’s Early Modern Medical Almanacs,” 386.
48
Jinner, “An Almanack and Prognostication... 1658,” 20.
49
Ibid.
50
Ginnor [pseud.], “The Womans Almanack,” 261.
51
Jinner, “An Almanack and Prognostication… 1658,” 21.
52
Ibid.
53
Capp, Astrology, 23.
54
Curth, English Almanacs, Astrology and Popular Medicine: 1550-1700, 69.
55
Ginnor’s reference to Cromwell’s death means that the almanac was published
sometime after September 1658. Jinner would likely have already compiled her
1659 almanac and submitted it for printing before Cromwell’s death. If Ginnor’s
mock almanac was published in the late fall of 1659 it is possible that Jinner had
already compiled her almanac for 1660 as well by the time Ginnor’s parody was
released.
56
Harvey, 12.
57
Capp, Astrology, 85.
58
Ibid, 87.
59
Ibid, 59.
60
Ibid.
61
Hutton, The British Republic 1649-1660, 73-4.
62
Jinner, “An Almanack and Prognostication... 1659,” 62.
63
Ibid.
64
Jinner, “An Almanack and Prognostication… 1659,” 79.
65
Ibid.
66
Ibid.
67
Ibid, 80.
68
Schwoerer, “Women’s Public Political Voice in England 1640-1740,” 65.
69
Jinner, “An Almanack and Prognostication… 1659,” 75.
70
Ibid, 62.
71
Ibid, 63.
72
Jinner, “An Almanack or Prognostication for the Year of Our Lord 1660,” C1r.
73
Hutton, The British Republic 1649-1660, 114-20.
74
Jinner, “An Almanack or Prognostication… 1660,” C1r.
40
208
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
75
Ibid.
Ibid, C4v.
77
Ibid, B1r.
78
Jinner, “An Almanack and Prognostication for the Year of Our Lord 1664,”
109.
79
Anon., Poor Robin A3v-4r.
76
209
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Conclusion
Anthropologists studying rituals which invert sex roles typically agree,
according to Natalie Zemon Davis, that cross-gender performances “are
ultimately sources of order and stability in a hierarchical society. They can clarify
the structure by the process of reversing [it],” and they “can correct and relieve
the system when it has become authoritarian,” but “they do not question the basic
order of the society itself.”1 Davis challenges this view with particular reference
to male-to-female cross-dressing and argues that “the image of the disorderly
woman did not always function to keep women in their place. On the contrary, it
was a multivalent image that could operate, first, to widen behavioural options for
women within and even outside of marriage, and second, to sanction riot and
political disobedience for both men and women in a society that allowed the lower
orders few formal means of protest.”2
In tracing the role of female impersonation as a tool for political and social
critique, I have largely found that disorderly female personae shame the
individual men at the very top of a political or familial hierarchy for their
misconduct but do not agitate for a whole scale reform of patriarchal hierarchy.
Because many of the authors who assume these female personae were presumably
men, I have argued that female personae served in early Stuart England as a
211
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
vehicle for authors to critique the Stuart patriarchal system’s inequalities while at
the same time safeguarding the masculine privilege that system afforded males for
themselves. In Chapter One I argued that Epicoene’s Dauphine used a female
impersonator and Swetnam the Woman-Hater’s Lorenzo used a female disguise to
pinpoint and/or correct weaknesses in their households/kingdoms so that they
might strengthen their position as future patriarchs by protecting and maintaining
their inheritances. In Chapter Two I traced female impersonation’s increased
politicization as a tool for authors to debate parliament’s relationship with the
king through the sexualized lens of the family-state analogy. Female personae in
Civil War porno-political print, I demonstrated in that chapter, present a critique
of political and militarized ideals of masculinity and locate the masculine ideal in
a head of household who can properly rein in the chaotic sexuality of his wife.
Sarah Jinner’s 1658-60 almanacs, I argued in Chapter Three, carry forward the
politically-charged associations that explicit sexual discourse and female authorial
personae acquired in the 1640s to critique the Protectorate government. Over the
course of the early to mid-seventeenth century, then, female impersonation
evolved from its roots as a disciplinary tool for communities to critique problems
within individual households (as it was in its Skimmington incarnation) and
moved out of performance and into print to enable broader political critiques of
the state as a household out of order.
212
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
The disorderly female persona in Jacobean and Caroline England thus
seems to have been a tool for male authors to perform a limited critique of
patriarchal hierarchy. Jinner in the late 1650s, however, managed to use it in ways
Restoration censors and others found legitimately threatening. While Jinner
scholars have in general attempted to distance Jinner from the disorderly
pornographic aspects of her persona that her imitator Sarah Ginnor emphasized in
The Woman’s Almanack, Jinner’s pornographic content within the broader context
of female impersonation in early Stuart England connects her to traditions of
political protest that trace back to Skimmington riding and the Braydon Forest
riots of the 1630s. While these traditions of female impersonation and protest
were nearly always male-led, Jinner (if we accept that she was a woman)
demonstrates that by the 1650s women themselves were beginning to find power
in staging disorderly female conduct in print. If Davis is right that women enjoyed
“widen[ed] behavioural options” in the early modern period in part through
performances of disorderly women on top, my dissertation adds to this insight the
specific claim that female impersonation widened those options within print
culture itself.
Female impersonation does not ultimately have a transformative effect on
early modern English culture, however. Jinner’s attempts to harness the political
power of the disorderly female persona result in Ginnor’s depoliticizing imitation,
in the absence of political material from her final 1664 almanac, and in the
213
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
discontinuation of her almanac series. But the broader political context of Jinner’s
almanacs – the crumbling Protectorate regime and the incipient Restoration –
explain in part why efforts to achieve more transformative change through the
disorderly female persona stalled in the final years of the Interregnum. Charles II
and the Restoration court separated themselves from the Puritan Protectorate
regime in part by embracing a libertine philosophy of disorderly sexuality.
Displays of promiscuity and bodily pleasure in Restoration culture could be
patriarchal and gendered, but the discourse of disorderly femininity itself seems to
lose its edge as a critique of patriarchal hierarchy in the 1660s. While sexualized
female personae in the early Stuart period critiqued patriarchal authority by
positing that the promiscuity of Charles I and the members of parliament was an
emasculating flaw, for instance, insinuations of promiscuity levelled at Charles II
would not have registered in the ways they had a few decades earlier. Thus, while
female impersonation may have temporarily opened a window for women to
participate in satirical critiques of patriarchal hierarchy, political events ensured
that this window was soon shut.
As a tool of social critique, further, female impersonation may have
contributed in part to the preservation of existing political and patriarchal
hierarchies through the challenging years of the Civil Wars and Interregnum.
While many predicted that radically different systems would replace the Stuart
monarchy, the satirically apocalyptic visions of London without men in The City
214
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Dames Petition served, as I have demonstrated, to make readers appreciate an
idealized vision of a libertine Caroline London that had ostensibly been lost. This
vision of the lost Caroline London, as I discussed briefly, bears more than a
passing resemblance to the libertine London Charles II would later restore. Sarah
Jinner’s almanacs, likewise, predict futures that are bleak, chaotic, and full of
“Arbitrary” and unconstitutional governmental structures which assume control of
England for themselves and oppress the people they are meant to represent.
Although Jinner does not mention the potential return of the monarchy, her
pessimism might well make readers long for the relative stability of the Jacobean
and early Caroline periods. In this way, finally, one of the most interesting things
female impersonation enables in early Stuart England is a kind of discourse that
immunizes readers from rhetorics of revolution. By advocating for small reforms
of patriarchal abuses, and by blaming patriarchal oppression on a few misguided
or flawed patriarchs, female impersonation makes early Stuart patriarchal
hierarchy resilient to change and explains perhaps why Charles II was able to
restore so much of the political culture that had existed in England before the
regicide.
Notes
1
2
Davis, 130.
Ibid, 131.
215
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Anon, Sundry Virgins. The Virgins Complaint. London: Printed for Henry
Wilson, 1642.
Anon. Cupids Master-piece, or, The Free-school of Witty and Delightful
Complements. London: Printed for John Andrews..., n.d.
———. Poor Robin. London: Printed for the Company of Stationers, 1664.
———. Swetnam: The Woman-Hater: The Controversy and the Play. Edited by
Coryl Crandal. Purdue, IL: Purdue UP, 1969.
———. “The Humble Petition of Divers Well-affected Women.” In Women’s
Political Writings, 1610-1725, edited by Hilda L. Smith, Mihoko Suzuki, and
Susan Wiseman, 36–8. Vol. 2. London: n.p., 1649.
———. “The Humble Petition of Many Hundreds of Distressed Women,
Tradesmens Wives, and Widdowes.” In Women’s Political Writings, 16101725, edited by Hilda L. Smith, Mihoko Suzuki, and Susan Wiseman, 10–1.
London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007.
———. The Humble Petition of Many Thousands of Wives and Matrons of the
City of London. London: Printed for John Cookson, 1643.
———. The Ladies Remonstrance, Or, A Declaration of the WaitingGentlewomen, Chambermaids, and Servant-Maids of the City of London.
n.p., 1659.
———. The Mid-wives Just Petition. London: s.n., 1643.
———. The Practical Part of Love. London: n.p., 1660.
———. The Resolution of the Women of London to Parliament. [London: s.n.],
1642.
De Flores, Juan. Histoire De Aurelio Et Isabelle, Fille Du Roy d’Escose,
Nouuellement Traduict En Quatre Langues, Italien, Espaignol, Francois, &
217
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Anglois. Brussells: Chez Iean Mommart, & Iean Reys, Auecq priuilege I.D.
Busschere, 1608.
Ginnor [pseud.], Sarah. “The Womans Almanack.” In The Early Modern
Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, Series II: Printed
Writings, 1641-1700: Part 1, Vol 6: Almanacs, edited by Alan S. Weber,
251–66. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.
Jinner, Sarah. “An Almanack and Prognostication for the Year of Our Lord
1658.” In The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of
Essential Works, Series II: Printed Writings, 1641-1700: Part 1, Vol 6:
Almanacs, edited by Alan S. Weber, 1–40. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.
———. “An Almanack and Prognostication for the Year of Our Lord 1659.” In
The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works,
Series II: Printed Writings, 1641-1700: Part 1, Vol 6: Almanacs, edited by
Alan S. Weber, 43–82. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.
———. “An Almanack and Prognostication for the Year of Our Lord 1664.” In
The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works,
Series II: Printed Writings, 1641-1700: Part 1, Vol 6: Almanacs, edited by
A. S. Weber, 85–124. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.
———. “An Almanack or Prognostication for the Year of Our Lord 1660”.
London: Printed for the Company of Stationers, 1659.
Jonson, Ben. Epicoene, or The Silent Woman. In Jonson: Four Comedies, edited
by Helen Ostovich, 230–368. London: Longman, 1997.
Melancholicus [pseud.], Mercurius. Mistris Parliament Brought to Bed of a
Monstrous Childe of Reformation. Printed in the Yeer of the Saints fear,
1648.
Neville, Henry. A Parliament of Ladies. [London]: [s.n.], 1647.
Stradling et al., [pseud.] Mrs. The City-Dames Petition in The Behalfe of the Long
Afflicted, but Well-affected Cavaliers. [London]: n.p., 1647.
218
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Secondary Sources
Bennett, Martyn. The Civil Wars in Britain and Ireland 1638-1651. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1997.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “Marriage Strategies as Strategies of Social Reproduction.” In
Family and Society, edited by Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, and
Translated by Elborg Forster and Patricia M. Ranum, 117–44. Baltimore:
John’s Hopkins UP, 1976.
Braddick, Michael. God’s Fury England's Fire. London: Allen Lane, 2008.
Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. 3rd ed. Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2009.
Button, Andrea. “Royalist Women Petitioners in South-West England.” The
Seventeenth Century 15, no. 1 (2000): 53–66.
Capp, Bernard. Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500-1800.
London: Faber and Faber, 1979.
———. “Jinner, Sarah (fl. 1658–1664).” Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography. Oxford UP, 2004.
http://www.oxforddnb.com.libaccess.lib.mcmaster.ca/view/article/60915,
accessed 26 April 2013.
———. “Playgoers, Players and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern London: The
Bridewell Evidence.” The Seventeenth Century 18, no. 2 (2003): 159–71.
Cressy, David. “Gender Trouble and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern England.”
Journal of British Studies 35, no. 4 (1996): 438–65.
Curth, Louise Hill. English Almanacs, Astrology and Popular Medicine: 15501700. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007.
———. “The Medical Content of English Almanacs 1640-1700.” Journal of the
History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 60, no. 3 (July 2005): 255–82.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15917257.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford,
CA: Stanford UP, 1986.
219
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Drouin, Jennifer. “Cross-Dressing, Drag, and Passing: Slippages in
Shakespearean Comedy.” In Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender
Casting in Contemporary Performance, edited by James C. Bullman, 23–56.
Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2008.
Feist, Timothy. “The Stationers’ Voice The English Almanac the Early
Eighteenth Trade Century in the Early Eighteenth Century.” Transactions of
the American Philosophical Society 95, no. 4 (2005): 1–129.
Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New
York: Routledge, 1992.
Gillespie, Katharine. Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century: English
Women Writers and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.
Harvey, Elizabeth. Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English
Renaissance Texts. London: Routledge, 1992.
Herbert, Henry. “Captain Henry Herbert’s Narrative of His Journey Through
France with His Regiment, 1671-3.” In Camden Miscellany XXX, edited by J.
Childs, 271–369. 4th ser. 3., 1990.
Howard, Jean E. “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early
Modern England.” Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 4 (1998): 418–40.
Hutton, Ronald. The British Republic 1649-1660. 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin’s
P, 2000.
Jones, Ann Rosalind. “From Polemical Prose to the Red Bull: The Swetnam
Controversy in Women-Voiced Pamphlets and the Public Theater.” In The
Politics of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World, edited by
Elizabeth Fowler and Roland Greene, 122–37. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1997.
Kennedy, D.E. The English Revolution 1642-1649. New York: St Martin’s P,
2000.
Korda, Natasha. Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English
Stage. Philadelphia: U of Pensylania P, 2011.
220
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
———. “The Case of Moll Frith: Women’s Work and the ‘All-Male Stage’.” In
Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, edited
by Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin, 71–87. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.
Kyle, Chris R. “Prince Charles in the Parliaments of 1621 and 1624.” The
Historical Journal 41, no. 3 (1998): 603–24.
Langert, Christina Bosco. “Hedgerows and Petticoats: Sartorial Subversion and
Anti-enclosure Protest in Seventeenth-century England.” Early Theatre 12,
no. 1 (2010): 119-35.
Macinnes, Allan I. The British Revolution, 1629-1660. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005.
Mack, Phyllis. Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century
England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.
Matulka, Barbara. The Novels of Juan De Flores and Their European Diffusion: A
Study in Comparative Literature. New York: Institute of French Studies,
1931.
Moulton, Ian Frederick. Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern
England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
Nevitt, Marcus. Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England.
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.
Ng, Su Fang. Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-century
England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.
Orgel, Stephen. Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s
England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.
Phillippy, Patricia. “The Mat(t)er of Death: The Defense of Eve and the Female
Ars Moriendi.” In Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500-1700,
edited by Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki, 141–60. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Purkiss, Diane. Literature, Gender, and Politics During the English Civil War.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.
221
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
———. “Material Girls: The Seventeenth-Century Woman Debate.” In Women,
Texts and Histories 1575-1760, edited by Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss, 69–
101. London: Routledge, 1992.
Raymond, Joad. Making the News: An Anthology of the Newsbooks of
Revolutionary England: 1641-1660. Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned
with British. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1993.
———. The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641-1649. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2005.
Raynalde, Thomas. The Birth of Mankind. Edited by Elaine Hobby. Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2009.
Schwoerer, Lois G. “Women’s Public Political Voice in England 1640-1740.” In
Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, edited by
Hilda L. Smith, 56–74. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
Sharp, Buchanan. In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the
West of England, 1586-1660. Berkeley: U of California P, 1980.
Shepard, Alexandra. Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England. Vol. 1.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.
Shepherd, Simon. Amazons and Warrior Women: Varieties of Feminism in
Seventeenth-Century Drama. Brighton, UK: Harvester P, 1981.
Skerpan, Elizabeth. The Rhetoric of Politics in the English Revolution 1642-1660.
Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1992.
Smith, Hilda L., Mihoko Suzuki, and Susan Wiseman, eds. “A True Copie of the
Petition of the Gentlewomen, and Tradesmens-wives in and About the City
of London.” In Women’s Political Writings, 1610-1725, 12–6. London: John
Bull, 1641.
Smyth, Adam. “Almanacs, Annotators, and Life-Writing in Early Modern
England.” English Literary Renaissance 38, no. 2 (May 2008): 200–44.
http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/j.1475-6757.2008.00122.x.
Snook, Edith. Women, Beauty and Power in Early Modern England: A Feminist
Literary History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
222
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Stryker, Susan, and Stephen Whittle, eds. The Transgender Studies Reader. New
York: Routledge, 2006.
Suzuki, Mihoko. Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary
Form in England, 1588-1688. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.
Thauvette, Chantelle. “Masculinity and Turkish Captivity in in Swetnam the
Woman-Hater.” SEL 52, no. 2 (2012): 425–45.
Toulalan, Sarah. Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth-Century
England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.
Turner, James Grantham. Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London:
Sexuality, Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630-1685. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2002.
———. Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy,
France, and England 1534-1685. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.
Underdown, David. Revel, Riot, and Rebellion. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.
Vaught, Jennifer C. Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature.
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.
Wall, Wendy. The Imprint of Gender. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993.
Wayne, Valerie. “The Dearth of the Author: Anonymity’s Allies and Swetnam the
Woman-Hater.” In Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s
Alliances in Early Modern England, edited by Susan Frye and Karen
Robertson, 221–40. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
Weber, A. S. “Women’s Early Modern Medical Almanacs in Historical Context.”
English Literary Renaissance 33, no. 3 (November 2003): 358–402.
http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/j.1475-6757.2003.00032.x.
Weber, Alan S. “Introductory Note.” In Almanacs, edited by Betty S. Travitsky
and Patrick Cullen, ix–xxi. Vol. 6. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.
Wiseman, Susan. “‘Adam, the Father of All Flesh’: Porno-Political Rhetoric and
Political Theory in and After the English Civil War.” In Pamphlet Wars:
Prose in the English Revolution, edited by James Holstun, 134–57. London:
Frank Cass, 1992.
223
PhD Thesis – C. Thauvette; McMaster University – English & Cultural Studies
Young, Michael B. “Charles I and the Erosion of Trust, 1625-1628.” Albion: A
Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 22, no. 2 (January 1990):
217–35. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4049598?origin=crossref.
224